Rudd's Re-written Past
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Columnist
March 11, 2007
More memory troubles for Labor leader Kevin Rudd.
Rudd has often explained he became a Labor man in large part because of a great tragedy - the early death of his father and the eviction of his mother from their share farm when he was just 11.
Here’s how he’s typically told it:
I think my father’s death was difficult at an early age, being evicted actually was the harder bit because we were share farmers, we didn’t own the property so bury Dad one day and get tossed off the property virtually the next with nowhere to go and no assets because you don’t own a house if you’re a share farmer either… I had the earliest flickering of a sense of justice and injustice and I just thought it was plain wrong that that could happen to anybody or that you didn’t have anywhere there to go and stay and that was really tough.
It’s a great Labor story. Rudd even tells of having to sleep in his mum’s car.
But here now is how the children of the farmer who evicted the Rudds remember it:
Dad was a caring, compassionate man with terrific family values. What pains us most is the fact that he thought the world of the Rudds…
Since 1956, Bert [Rudd] had been employed as a share farmer and when the monthly milk cheque came in, his wage was half that cheque…
When Bert died our father had no choice but to employ a new farmer. It was the biggest dairy farm on the Sunshine Coast and there were more than 120 cows that needed milking morning and night.
Margaret [Rudd] would always have known at some point, inevitably, an incoming farmer would have to occupy the farmhouse.
But provisions were put in place by our father for Margaret. He explained to her she could remain on the farm, at no cost whatsoever, until such time as the new farmer arrived.
What Kevin has always failed to state is that the new farmer didn’t even arrive until July - that’s almost six months after his father’s death. During that entire time, our family continued to run the farm…
There was absolutely no reason for them to have left until the new farmer arrived in July.
To continuously say he was evicted immediately after his dad’s funeral is quite an unbelievable statement.
And here’s how other people in the town remember it:
Daphne Greer knew Aubrey Low most of her life and regularly socialised with the Rudds. “The Aubrey Low I knew - and the Aubrey Low everyone else around here knew - would never have evicted Margaret Rudd,” she said.
“He was a decent man. The whole tale is bizarre, to say the least.”
And:
Joan Keehn knew Aubrey Low and socialised with the Rudds.
“When these articles began to appear, the older faces around town said ‘That can’t be right,’ “ she said. “Aubrey was a good fella, a hard-working family man. He provided for his kids and had a good heart.”
This is not the first time Rudd has been accused rewriting the details of his father’s death in ways that give him a political advantage.
Here he blames bad Queensland hospitals for his father’s death:
Labor leader Kevin Rudd said the death of his father Albert Rudd in 1969, from a hospital-acquired infection, propelled his political aspirations.
Mr Rudd joined the Queensland branch of the Labor Party at 16, five years after his father died from an infection that developed while he was recovering from a serious car accident at the Brisbane Royal Hospital.
“Life changed overnight ... as I thought about it later on, as a kid growing up, it became clearer and clearer to me that the hospital system that I grew up with, that he had to use, was by that stage pretty much Third World,” Mr Rudd told the Nine Network.
In fact:
Mr Rudd said in later years he heard reports that surgeons at the Brisbane Royal Hospital had failed to take proper care of his father. But according to Channel Nine’s Sunday program, which obtained a copy of the coroner’s report, the coroner had cleared doctors of medical malpractice.
The report said Albert Rudd had been drinking before driving, that he kept falling asleep at the wheel, and that when the car hit a power pole, he was not wearing a seatbelt and suffered massive internal injuries.
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