Dear Mr Rudd

I know you are not reading this but I will pretend you are. Its not only that people have stopped listening to you, but that you need to start listening to people with good practical advice, not those advisors around you who live in a virtual world with no moral compass.

Many people voted for you because they thought you had moral fortitude, that you were honest and had conviction, and possibly even a vision for a better and fairer Australia. God forbid after Howard we would have voted for a cockroach. Now you have shown you are just another expedient politician who doesn't really have the courage of your convictions, in fact you don't seem to have any convictions. You are letting people down now because you engendered hope, and we expected more. How many times do you have to read what is the narrative here? What is the big picture? Where are we going? The question is asked of you every week.

As a former bureaucrat you must recognise that everything the Government has attempted (to change or improve) has been thwarted by the gross incompetence of the public sector in health, defence, education, the environment and indigenous affairs. If you are unwilling to grasp the nettle and make the hard decisions (take the risks) to fix these things then you should move on and let someone with the vision and the courage do so. Why did you want the job if you weren't going to give it a "red hot go?". You should be relieved your current political opponent is an idiot, and the fact he is able to seriously challenge you says so much.

50 50 with 3 months to go
not long to go now for workplace contracts to be back
and unfair dismisal laws to be scrapped
go abbott go

When Howard was at the same point during his first term, people were also predicting his downfall.

He'd lost a number of Ministers who had to resign due to impropriety, he'd alienated gun owners and increased the Medicare levy to fund his buy-back scheme and the memories of dogs and balaclavas in the workplace were still fresh. Commentators were saying he had no sense of direction for the country and the huge Government service cutbacks had hurt a lot of people.

Labor won more votes as I recall but not in the seats that mattered.

Despite the media frenzy it's still too early to write Rudd off. A change back to the Libs after one term, considering the successful GFC outcome would be extremely reactionary.

To vote for an obstructive Opposition that claims it has suddenly "learned from it's mistakes and reinvented itself" after only a few months under Abbott would be a bit of a worry for future stability.

Australians are notoriously ungrateful, for things they think they are entitled to. The big cash throwaways, when Rudd was the latest billionaire, are soon forgotten, and the future lack of bread in the larder worries people. Even the pensioners getting a better fair go, under Rudd, are balanced by the self funded retirees, whose super is taking a bit of a pounding.

Rudd’s greatest failure is to have forgotten who put him there. My fan club on OLO screams blue murder when I remind them that 65% of Australians are Christian. Many do not go to church every Sunday, but the moral values of Christianity run deep, and so do the suspicions about other faiths, and even about fellow believers.

If Abbott was an Anglican he would be much more popular, as the Catholic Church is taking a caning. However his moral values with a wife and three daughters, in a stable marriage, are beyond question. There are an enormous number of very good people in the Roman Catholic Church. It lost England to the scholarship of its own people in the United Kingdom. In England the former England went nearly universally for the Conservatives, while Wales with a significant Roman Catholic element and Scotland, went heavily Labor. Only one seat in Scotland is held by the Conservatives.

Without the cooperation of Christian Australians the country could not be governed. The Church is divided, and once the rebellion against the English promoted by Irish Roman Catholics was ended in 1922, by home rule, attendance at Catholic Churches declined. However they remain Christians. Latham lost because he behaved and admitted he was an atheist. Kim Christian Beasley, was shy about his middle name, and there was nothing Christian about workchoices. Rudd could have called an election on Climate Change, while he had Turnbull on side, and won, so he is really into his second semester, and just may fail in his third.

He could change but it seems unlikely

Peter
While you make some valid points about the relevance of our Judeo-Christian heritage, I don't think Latham's demise had anything at all to do with atheism. Even the Christian politicians among us claim to be, for the most part, secular humanists.

Someone asked me for my view of the next election. If I had to put money on it I would back Labor to win. But I wouldn't want to put any money on it at the moment. It will probably be won in the marginals, and Labor has given some of those away with its opportunistic tax on mining companies. So it has given away a couple of goals for nothing.

Labor supporters are strongly behind Rudd, so I don't think Gillard is an option, even if it was the smart thing to do to replace Rudd with Gillard, which it probably isn't at this stage of the cycle. And in some ways they could get two for the price of one. If there was an expectation that Rudd would fall over the line and then move on leaving Julia in charge, then they might claw some support back.

I was listening to commercial radio last night - force-fed through the speakers in the gym. They had a skit where someone called Kevin Rudd did a stand-up comedy act, and each time he promised something the crowd laughed. But the largest laugh was for the straight "man", someone called Jessica Watson, who delivered the killer line "I disagree with the PM". When you're being twitted on commercial radio by a 16 year old and the crowd is loving it, you're in very deep water without a life raft..