Rudd’s Way: November 2007 – June 2010

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 swam out of his depth; who wanted to achieve much, but was eventually unable to take action on climate change — the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else.

This is a book that no voter who wants to understand the challenges of the future can afford to be without.

Nicholas Stuart joined the ABC in 1985, worked in Radio News, ABC Radio Current Affairs, and ABC TV, and was the ABC’s Indochina correspondent before returning to Australia after a severe car accident. He is a regular columnist for the Canberra Times, and has written two critically acclaimed books analysing Labor and politics: Kevin Rudd: an unauthorised political biography and What Goes Up: behind the 2007 election (both published by Scribe). He is married to Catherine McGrath, the political editor of Australia Network. They live in Canberra and have three children: Anastasia, Eugenia, and Maximilian.