Mr Rudd has apologised to his wife for something, but he can't remember what. He hopes the electorate will forgive him, but he doesn't believe he did anything. He acknowledges he showed poor judgement, but doesn't accept it is poor in the area of Iraq, where he wants a successful and effective campaign policy to stop, or Industrial Relations, where he wants more clients for his wife, or in choosing his friends, or in destroying evidence.
He doesn't promise much, and polls show he might be asked to deliver.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Scores. "Now Sam, I Never Said I Was Perfect"
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Rudd strip club visit sparks rash of confessions
from news.com.au
OPPOSITION Leader Kevin Rudd says he's never claimed to be "Captain Perfect", and his decision to visit a New York strip club is the kind of mistake blokes make.
He may be right, because today a number of his blokey colleagues, and one woman, admitted they had seen strippers.
It was revealed yesterday that Mr Rudd visited Scores gentlemen's club in Manhattan in 2003 with fellow Labor MP Warren Snowdon and New York Post editor Col Allan during a taxpayer-funded trip when he was opposition foreign affairs spokesman.
Mr Rudd has apologised but said he has little recollection of what happened in the strip club, because he had had too much to drink.
"I think any bloke who's honest about their lives can point to times in their lives when they've got it wrong," Mr Rudd said today.
"I've done that, but can I say the attitude of the Australian community, their evaluation of me, that's a matter for them and I accept their judgment.
"I have never tried to present myself as Captain Perfect - I'm not, never have been. Captain Morality or anything like that - I'm not, never have been and we all make mistakes and I've made one here."
Mr Rudd said he had been embarrassed by the revelation but he and Mr Snowdon had no recollection of any inappropriate behaviour and he had apologised to his wife after the incident.
When asked whether wife Terese Rein had given him a "verbal bollocking", a jovial Mr Rudd said: "Therese is a firm woman, we've been married a long time."
The confessions came thick and fast from other politicians after Mr Rudd's revelations.
First, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson admitted he visited a strip club almost 30 years ago.
"I remember being at one when I was 20, in Adelaide," he said on ABC radio in Adelaide.
"I suspect that there are many Australian men and an increasing number of women who have done so as well."
Then Victorian Premier John Brumby suggested strip clubs were the only reason people visited
Sydney.
"The last time I attended a strip place would have probably been in the 1970s, when I was a student, I think if my memory's correct it was probably in Sydney," he said.
"It was with a group of mates, male and female, I can't remember the name of the place."
Queensland Government ministers were falling over themselves to fess up and even Deputy Premier Anna Bligh owned up to a bit of mischief.
"I've seen a strip-o-gram in a Chinese restaurant once - does that count?" she said.
Local Government Minister Andrew Fraser said he hadn't been to a strip club - at least recently.
"Not as a married man. I suppose we're all young once."
Transport Minister Paul Lucas said he had seen strip shows "a couple of times" in his 20s.
"I also actually had a couple of ciggies behind the bike shed at school, I think I swore on the football field when I played football a couple of times, and I was almost late for Mass on Sunday," he said.
But Premier Peter Beattie said he had never been interested in strip clubs. and Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott wouldn't say.
Prime Minister John Howard today declined to comment on the scandal.
But Greens leader Bob Brown said the revelations should be kept in perspective.
"Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club," Senator Brown said.
"Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war.
"I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm," he said.
Long-running scandal threatens Rudd
from Piers Akerman
AT the beginning of last week, the Howard Government’s appointment of Queenslander Susan Kiefel to the highest court in the land embodied the best principles of the administration of the law.
At week’s end, in the same state, the scab was being lifted on one of the gravest legal scandals in the nation.
On Tuesday, Kiefel - a state school drop-out who completed her secondary education at night school while working by day - was appointed on merit in a most public rejection of the Australian Labor Party’s love affair with affirmative action. Ability, not gender, was the key.
On Thursday, Premier Peter Beattie was presented with a letter signed by former Western Australian Chief Justice (David Malcolm), two retired NSW Chief Judges (Jack Lee, now deceased, and Dr Frank McGrath), two retired NSW Supreme Court Justices (Roddy Meagher and Barry O’Keefe), one of Australia’s foremost QCs (Alec Shand) and a legal academic and barrister (Alastair MacAdam) all seeking the appointment of an Independent Special Prosecutor into an unresolved outrageous injustice now known as the Heiner Affair, which has been poisonously suppurating since the days of the Goss government.
A copy of this letter was also received by Queensland’s Governor, Chief Justice, Opposition Leader, Bar Association and Law Society.
It followed the completion of a two-year audit by leading NSW QC, David Rofe, who prepared a 3000-page, nine volume report on the case and concluded there were 67 alleged unaddressed prima facie criminal charges that needed to be urgently addressed.
At the heart of the matter is the order by the Goss Cabinet of March 5, 1990, to destroy all documents relating to an inquiry by retired magistrate Noel Heiner into the management of the John Oxley Youth Detention Centre.
Heiner had been appointed by Premier Wayne Goss’s predecessor, Premier Russell Cooper, in late 1989 to investigate serious allegations of the abuse of children in the state youth detention centre, including the rape of a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl by male inmates in May, 1988, during a supervised bush outing, raised by several youth workers.
Outrageously, this rape is still unresolved.
Youth centre manager Peter Coyne and deputy Anne Dutney called on their senior union organiser, Kevin Lindeberg, of the Queensland Professional Officers Association, to protect their interests. Lindeberg was to become the whistleblower.
Coyne and Dutney, not unreasonably, sought to see the specific complaints laid against them, so they could defend themselves before Heiner. This request was denied them.
Barely a month after the Goss government came to office in December, 1989, it closed down the enquiry and transferred Coyne to other duties. He and Dutney engaged counsel to seek any Heiner material relating to them, while their solicitor placed the Queensland government on notice of the proceedings and instructed the government not to destroy any documents.
The union joined the dispute on March 1 and Lindeberg was assured by the government that the material was safe - but it wasn’t. Cabinet decided to shred the material on March 5 and it was secretly fed through a shredder on March 23.
In early March, Lindeberg inadvertently learnt of the secret shredding by a ministerial staffer, challenged it and was removed from the case at the request of the families minister.
He was sacked by the union six weeks later, one charge being that he had been “inappropriate and over-confrontationalist’’ in “the Coyne case’’.
After an outcry by union members, he was conditionally reinstated, but informed the union executive the shredding was a potential illegal act involving the entire Goss Cabinet, or the families minister or the departmental CEO.
In August, he was again dismissed on challenged grounds under an arbitration forced upon him and subject to a divided union vote.
Since then, Lindeberg has fought for justice. In 1998, he obtained access to the relevant March 5, 1990, Cabinet submission and received advice from senior counsel and Sir Harry Gibbs, a former Chief Justice of the High Court, that it contained sufficient inculpatory evidence to warrant charges under Section 129 of the Queensland Code to be brought against those involved in the shredding decision.
In last Thursday’s letter to Beattie, the legal authorities “indicate our deep concern about its (the law’s) undermining, as the unresolved Heiner Affair reveals’’.
They say that an “unacceptable application of the criminal law by prima facie double standards, by Queensland law-enforcement authorities’’ has been exposed by the successful prosecution of another person, Douglas Ensbey, for destruction of material which may be required as evidence under S129 - but not against members of the “Executive Government and certain civil servants for similar destruction-of-evidence conduct’’.
“Compelling evidence suggests that the erroneous interpretation of S129 of the Code, used by those authorities to justify the shredding of the Heiner inquiry documents, may have knowingly advantaged Executive Government and certain civil servants,’’ they wrote, noting that the Queensland Court of Appeal case in 2004 exposed the erroneous interpretation.
They also said they agreed with the late Sir Harry Gibbs, a former Chief Justice of the High Court, who advised that the reported facts (of the Heiner Affair) represent, “at least, a prima facie offence under S129 concerning destruction of evidence’’.
This may all seem like a dry old argument, but it has enormous relevance right now.
Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd was Goss’s chief of staff at the time of the Heiner Affair and shortly after took on the newly-created position of Director-General of the Cabinet Office.
According to Queensland academic Scott Prasser: “Rudd was the de facto power behind the throne. He was Wayne Goss’s closest adviser and the Premier’s Mr Fixit. He was the key man’’.
Last December, Queensland Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson said: “Rudd’s chief credential for Labor leadership is that he knows power and has exercised it at the highest levels of government. He ran the government of Queensland for six years ...’’’
The Heiner Affair has been put squarely in the public arena by some of the most respected members of the judiciary and the legal fraternity, people not given to demonstrations of public outrage; but who felt that the shredding of evidence by the Goss executive represented a full frontal attack on the separation of powers, on the judiciary’s function.
Given that the matter remains unresolved, there is no guarantee it might not happen again.
These black letter law figures aren’t interested in politics or personalities, but they are gravely concerned about the conduct of the law and, in particular, the manner in which it was applied to a decision of the Queensland government at a time when, as it happens, Rudd held a position of great influence with unhindered access to Cabinet documents.
With the Australian people soon to decide whether Rudd should be the next Prime Minister, it is time the Heiner Affair was thoroughly investigated and justice applied.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/long_running_scandal_threatens_rudd/
Rudd related to former stripper
from news.com.au
KEVIN Rudd's sister-in-law yesterday admitted to her secret past as a stripper, saying it was a period of her life she regretted.
Okhola Rudd, the wife of the federal opposition leader's brother Greg, said had she spent several months at a Brisbane strip club in 2001 working as an "exotic dancer".
"I didn't need to dance as an exotic dancer, it was just a stage that I went through," Mrs Rudd, 30, said.
"Some people go through drugs, some people choose to dance as an exotic dancer. It was fun for me.
"I am from the part of the world where I had never experienced that kind of stuff, so I just did it because it was there and it was fun to do."
Mrs Rudd is completing a masters degree in organisational psychology at Brisbane's Griffith University.
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