Based on an extensive series of detailed and off-the-record interviews, Nicholas Stuart — Kevin Rudd’s biographer and the author of an acclaimed study into the 2007 election — provides a critical examination of Labor in office and of the key events and crucial moments leading to Rudd’s downfall.
Rudd’s Way presents the first in-depth analysis of the way that Kevin Rudd’s government worked and why Labor eventually decided its leader had to be removed. Stuart argues that, more than under any previous government, the policies and direction of Australia over the period from November 2007 to June 2010 were set by just one man — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd — until he finally overreached himself and threatened to lead the party to electoral oblivion.
The background events and policy blunders that led to Rudd’s fall are described here in gripping detail, until we come to the final cataclysmic moment when the prime minister realised he’d been abandoned by the very team he’d led to government. It is the tragic story of a man who wanted to achieve much, but who was eventually unable to take action on the one problem he wanted to do more about than anything else — climate change.
This is a book that no voter who wants to understand the challenges of the future can afford to be without.
'... it is Stuart who offers the most valuable historical record to date of the Rudd years, by returning to the first principles of political journalism and compiling a detailed inventory of the government's major achievements ... Stuart's book proved particularly refreshing as a synthesis of Rudd's style as well as substance.'
The Australian Literary Review
'Nicholas Stuart has an amazing ability to deliver completed manuscripts about contemporary events in lightning-quick time ... Stuart has succeeded in delivering the most important aspect of his book: a quality assessment of the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the Rudd government.'
Peter Van Onselen, The Weekend Australian
