Kevin Rudd.
No more trips to high schools with selfie-centred hordes for Kevin Rudd. Photo: Nicolas Walker
There was wonderment in caucus when the headline finally broke

That the Nambour Kid was giving it away.

They found out only when he rose, and tremulously spoke,

Instead of in the customary way. 


To such a huge Kevelopment would normally accrue

An exordium of heraldry and archers.

But not this time; no hints leaked out, no Twitpic with a clue,

Or tantalising scoop of Peter Hartcher’s. 


He stood alone; no team of chums around him all a-simper

Or kids in shirts with Kevin’s name embossed

And ended – not with bangs, but with a well-constructed whimper –

The civil war that everybody lost.


The pathos was familiar; the tears, the sudden grin,

The boyish faux-dismay at having blubbed.

The gracious self-effacement and the bashful call for gin

The warm applause from everyone he’d snubbed.


Of senior Labor soldiers to succumb to friendly fire

There are plenty whom the Nambour Kid’s outlasted.

Garrett, Emmo, Combet, Smith all opted to retire,

While Roxon couldn’t wait to flee the bastard.


But some have stuck around, those most impetuous of fools

Including folks who always wished Rudd ill.

The joke’s on them, of course, because by dint of his new rules

The Kid from Nambour’s stuck them with the bill.


His government now packed away, his Lodge keys handed back

His bureaucrats now resting or retrenched

The Nambour Kid at last gave up the dream of one more crack

At the job from which he twice was cruelly wrenched 


The ‘‘Gotta Zips’”, the trips in VIPs, the phone calls from Barack;

Are now the privilege of his successor.

His red-haired rival’s gone now, too, and never coming back.

She’s off to be a visiting professor. 


No more trips to high schools, then, with selfie-centred hordes

And mini-skirted schoolies shrieking ‘‘KEVIIIINNNNNN!!!’’

(So different from the Gillard visits, when – hostile and bored –

They pelted her with sandwiches and devon.) 


The Kid’s Brisvegas-bound, for now; he wants a quiet life.

He has his new granddaughter, and his health.

And (thanks to early prescience in Kevin’s choice of wife)

He knows the thrill of independent wealth.  


This comet leaves a complex trail; some see the triple A

And recall the ‘‘sorry’’ speech that healed a nation.

But others look aloft and see things quite a different way;

All leaky boats and dodgy insulation. 


Historians will one day have a cooler, distant view

Of Kevinism’s arc to death from birth

The rest of us will never quite forget the year or two

When Kevin really was a place on Earth.