THE battle for Kevin Rudd’s Brisbane seat of Griffith took an ominous turn three weeks ago. But he only has himself to blame.
It began on a street corner in his suburb of Norman Park, about 450m from his front door, about the same distance from the home of his LNP rival, Dr Bill Glasson.
This corner is an ideal spot for an energetic candidate to set up campaign corflutes and wave at passing motorists during the morning rush.
This is what Glasson, a former head of the Australian Medical Association, and friend of Tony Abbott, has been doing all over the electorate for months. With a brilliant grass roots campaign, staffed by more than 500 “Glasson’s Gladiators” volunteer, the respected ophthalmologist has defied expectations to close in on Labor’s safest Queensland seat. Two recent polls have even put him ahead of Rudd which, if the momentum holds, would make him a historic, totemic dragon-slayer on Saturday.
Labor could see Glasson was making inroads in Griffith, so one morning, when he turned up at his favourite campaign corner, he found two elderly Labor stalwarts had already set up shop, with balloons and corflutes bearing the single word “Kevin” in high-octane yellow, above an image of the prime minister.
The two campaigns shared the space companionably enough that morning, but the next day Glasson got out of bed half an hour earlier and beat his rivals to the corner.
The next day, the Labor stalwarts were there first, chuckling away, and on it went, until Glasson found himself standing alone in the pre-dawn darkness just to prove a point.
“I’m a country boy,” he told his rivals when they arrived. “I can keep getting here earlier and earlier. Or we can work as a team.”
Work as a team they did, arriving at the same time, buying each other coffees, sharing political war stories, discovering a mutual antipathy to Peter Beattie, and getting along so well that passersby commented on how nice it was to see such congeniality between foes.
But one morning, so the story goes, Kevin Rudd drove past and didn’t like what he saw. Perhaps the old guys didn’t fit with his youth-friendly selfie-seeking image.
Whatever his beef, a complaint was relayed to the Labor stalwarts that they looked like the two grumpy old muppets, Statler and Waldorf, who used to heckle the Muppet Show cast from a balcony.
The old guys took the insult in their stride, and the next time they showed up they stuck up a little sign: “Muppets Corner”.
But the day Rudd drafted Beattie onto his team, pushing aside the loyal preselected Labor candidate in Forde, three weeks ago, was the day the muppets could take no more.
The next day they didn’t show up. Muppets Corner is now the sole preserve of the “Glasson’s Gladiators.”
As old Labor melts away, in Griffith, you see this election writ small.
Glasson, 60, a sinewy jogger, is everywhere, on fun runs and charity bike rides, door-knocking, waving from corners.
Sightings of the Prime Minister, on the other hand, are as rare in the tight-knit coffee shop precinct of Bulimba, as they are in the funky West End, where a “Happy High Herbs” shop caters to arts students and the Greens vote is 20 percent.
You see the occasional “Kevin” corflute planted in someone’s front yard in Highgate Hill, adorned with a graffiti moustache.
This is Kevin territory, but it’s hard to find fans.
One is Glen Higgs, a microbiologist-turned owner of Café Citrus in Oxford Street, Bulimba, a few doors down from St John the Baptist Anglican church where Rudd is often photographed on Sunday mornings. He likes Glasson, but he is a Labor man.
“I support Kevin,” he says. “He hasn’t had a decent go.”
But he admits he has rarely seen Rudd in six years, “not to the extent that you would want your local member to be seen. You see Bill’s people everywhere. You don’t see Kevin’s. It’s a mistake.”
Even Vietnamese-born nurses’ aid Thi Nhunz Bui, 55, who was handing out yellow “Vote 4 Kevin” balloons at Kangaroo Point at 6am this week admitted there was hostility towards Rudd.
“People say ‘I hate him’,” she said.
“I hate him too, but I say give him another chance. One more term, because he didn’t have enough time. “
All politics is local in the end, and on the streets of Griffith, people’s hearts just aren’t in the Kevin project any more.
