Prime Minister
On 3 December 2007, Rudd was sworn in as the 26th Prime Minister of Australia by Governor-General Michael Jeffery. Rudd was the first Labor Prime Minister in over a decade, and the first ever to make no mention of the Monarch when taking his oath of office. He also became only the second Queenslander to lead his party to a federal election victory (the first being Andrew Fisher in 1910) and was the first Prime Minister since the Second World War not to have come from either New South Wales or Victoria.
Early initiatives of the Rudd Government included the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, a Parliamentary Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2020 Summit.
During his first two years in office, Rudd set records for popularity in Newspoll opinion polling, maintaining very high approval ratings. By 2010, however, Rudd's approval ratings had began to drop significantly, with controversies arising over the management of the financial crisis, the delay of the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, policies on asylum seekers and a debate over a proposed "super profits" tax on the mining industry.
The United States diplomatic cables leaks revealed that Robert McCallum, the former US Ambassador to Australia, described Rudd as a "control freak" and "a micro-manager", obsessed with "managing the media cycle rather than engaging in collaborative decision making". Diplomats also criticised Rudd's foreign policy record and considered Rudd's "mis-steps" largely arose from his propensity to make "snap announcements without consulting other countries or within the Australian Government".
On 23 June 2010, following lengthy media speculation, and after it had become apparent that Rudd had lost the support of many Labor MPs, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard publicly asked that a leadership election be held. Rudd announced a leadership election for the following day.
Read more about this topic: Kevinism
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)
“The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.”
—Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960)
“Vanessa wanted to be a ballerina. Dad had such hopes for her.... Corin was the academically brilliant one, and a fencer of Olympic standard. Everything was expected of them, and they fulfilled all expectations. But I was the one of whom nothing was expected. I remember a game the three of us played. Vanessa was the President of the United States, Corin was the British Prime Minister—and I was the royal dog.”
—Lynn Redgrave (b. 1943)
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)