Kevin Rudd goes all Pink at just another brick in his wall
Apart from the increasingly florid hue to his chubby cheeks, it has long been difficult to imagine Kevin Rudd occupying the same universe as Pink Floyd.
Until now.
preload="none" data-fm-brightcove-player="videoOptions: {autoPlay: false, hasCountDown: true, countdownLength: 5, inView: true}, playerControls: {enlarge: false, star: false, location: false, settings: false}, trackingOptions: { videoCategory:'video-news',videoSubCategory:'video-federal-politics',videoSite:'smh', videoName: 'Rudd\: \'Sometimes it\'ll turn to shit\'', videoId: '7591194', videoProducer: 'Edward Bodkin', contentType: 'Video', videoTotalLength: '65068', videoSource: 'Fair use', autoPlay: 'false', videoPlayMode: 'continuous', videoIssueDate: '2016-08-01T22:42:44+0000' }"/>
More News Videos
- Video duration
- 01:05
Rudd: 'Sometimes it'll turn to shit'
- Video duration
- 01:51
RBA cuts rates to new low
- Video duration
- 01:54
A 'de facto strike of backpackers'
- Video duration
- 01:57
Turnbull: Mediscare 'a shocking lie'
- Video duration
- 00:47
Drawing Malcolm Turnbull
- Video duration
- 01:00
PM on probation: Shorten
- Video duration
- 01:15
Rocky start to NT royal commission
Rudd: 'Sometimes it'll turn to shit'
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd shares his political insights with a youth branch of the Labor Party in Queensland on Saturday.
Mr Rudd, smarting from the Turnbull cabinet's failure to appreciate his genius for running not just a functional office as prime minister but his clear potential for running the world, has purloined one of Pink Floyd's more famed protest songs to amplify his annoyance.
"All in all, you're just another brick in the wall," he has been hollering.
Related Content
And yes, he has chosen as his recording studio a room full of juveniles.
Pink Floyd famously gathered a chorus of kiddy voices from the Fourth Form Music Class at Islington Green School, London to give the anthem its peculiar power. "We don't need no education," the pupils sang. "We don't need no thought control."
Mr Rudd's version involved a Brisbane room full of impressionable youngsters from the youth branch of the Queensland Labor Party.
"I've got a very dark, deep secret for you," he confided to the kiddies.
"Sometimes it'll turn to shit."
Oh, how nervously the gathering laughed, and how Kevin chuckled along, cloaking his inner rage with the force of will a secretary-general of the United Nations might display when, say, his hopes of a peace accord in eastern Europe had just been vetoed by Vladmir Putin.
Kevin allowed, trying dreadfully hard to appear modest, that he'd had a bit of experience with brick walls during his career trying to make "a huge difference" as prime minister, and on the international stage as foreign minister.
"And then one of those other brick walls presented itself in the form of Malcolm Turnbull," he declared.
For a moment, you expected Kevin to go full Floyd and begin bellowing, just like the enraged Pink at the end of Another Brick in the Wall Part II, "If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat? You! Yes, you behind the bike sheds, stand still laddy!"
Instead, Kevin contented himself with promising to have a bit more to say about the matter at another time.
Oh yes, and he feigned to shrug away the agony of it all as nothing more than ""part of the collective scar tissue of life".
Oh, please, Kevin. How did Pink Floyd put it? "No dark sarcasm in the classroom"?
Quite.