Australian Federal Election

I WAS more nervous than I thought I would be at the prospect of interviewing Australia's next Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
I'm Bernie Dowling, 53-years-old, and I have been a newspaper reporter for half my life.
We are three-weeks into a six-week election campaign to decide whether Australia has had enough of a conservative Liberal Party government and wants a slightly less conservative Rudd-led Labor Party government instead.
The newspapers I write for are the Wednesday and Friday weeklies, the Pine Rivers Press and the Northern Times.
We receive the call on Thursday morning. Labor leader Kevin Rudd is on the hustings in our shire that arvo.
He is doing the rounds of three shopping centres, in three electorates, none held by his Labor Party, and all within an area of 30 kilometres.
Westfield Strathpine, bang in the heart of the electorate of Dickson and also our shire of Pine Rivers, is his third port of call.
We arrange a couple of photographers because it is basically a photo-op gig, but I tag along, anyway.
Almost all of the electorate of Dickson, held for the conservatives, or rather the more-conservatives, by ex-copper and junior Minister Peter Dutton, is in the shire of Pine Rivers, our turf.
I am hoping it is an easy gig where I watch and record, as Rudd and Labor candidate Fiona McNamara press the flesh, bounce the bubbas and smile for the shooters, using cameras not guns.
Peter Dutton has to surrender an 8.9% lead to lose his seat, an impossibility in normal times.
It is not normal times. The Liberal-National Party coalition is on the nose because of its WorkChoices industrial relations system, an income redistribution scheme to take money from employees to give to employers.
Fiona McNamara is a likeable candidate with the common touch, and she seems to be running a genuine grass-roots campaign, rather than just saying she is.
I have the feeling she is going to set me up with an interview with Rudd.
Not because she respects me as a bright insightful reporter.
Certainly not because she wants to see me on the TV news with her champion. I am a pretty scruffy sort of bloke. I have a haircut 1-3 months after I need one. I wear the best shirts China can make to retail at $10 a pop. In short, I have a great look for radio and most of my newspaper headshots are embarrassing.
I have already given the reason Australia's next Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants to talk to me. Our newspaper the Pine Rivers Press reaches most of the voters of Dickson.
We in Pine Rivers are just north of the capital of Brisbane where the State of Queensland's major metro daily, the Courier Mail is based. Rudd and McNamara probably might think a few lines in the prestigious Courier-Mail are worth more than a page in the Pine Rivers Press, even though the Press raches a lot more Dickson readers than the Courier. And they know they can have that page in the Press and only salivate over those lines in the Courier.
Come in wild-manicured reporter Bernie Dowling and his nervous interview with Kevin Rudd.
I am unsure why I am nervous. I am a true democrat, valuing character over social position. Perhaps it is I have never met Rudd or I am wary of his social conservatism. It is probably I am just scared of authority, like a lot of us.
When a copper comes knocking on your door or a teacher asks you a sarcastic question, it is never going to end well.
My interview with Rudd is always going to end well.
As soon as I am asking the questions, I am in the groove. Asking questions gives you a bit of an edge, a piece of authority.
I have not prepared any questions, but then I do not do that much anymore, anyway.
I am not a big-city TV talking head, trying to catch the pollie out on a question I know the answer to only because a research assistant told me.
I do not ask Rudd what is the next railway stop, north of Strathpine. I ask him whether Fiona McNamara can take Peter Dutton down.
I am impressed with Kevin Rudd's answer, after the usuals spin of how wonderful a candidate Macca is, followed by a delightful and accurate working-class horse-racing analogy of how she is going to take Dutton down to the wire.
Maybe Kevin Rudd has a little pride in his working class background, after all. Our last Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating chastised working-class Australians for not aspiring for more than living in fibro houses.
A lot of good people lived in fibro houses. It is a shame they had to risk cancer from asbestos doing it.
On the Tuesday after our interview, Kevin Rudd backs the winner of the Melbourne Cup. The horse is named Efficient, in a week when the two major parties are arguing which can better manage the Australian Economy.
Efficient is alright as far as an image goes, but, at its best, it is a trifle dull; and at it worst, evokes pictures of efficiency experts, stop watches in hand, ringing blood, sweat and tears from honest toilers.
It is a pity but no horse called Visionary runs in this year’s Melbourne Cup.
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