TOM RICHARDSON: Blink, and you may have missed it, but the Prime Minister dropped by yesterday.

He also managed to drop into Tasmania and Western Australia.

Amid all the speculation about when the federal election will be called (and party volunteers were put on notice that it may be as soon as this weekend), it’s sometimes ignored that we are, to all intents and purposes, already in the midst of a campaign.

It’s as if Kevin Rudd, the comeback kid determined to once again be loved, has made a list of Tony Abbott’s key campaign dot points and, one by one, gone about crossing them off.

Repeal the carbon tax? Check. Well, sort of. Stop the boats? Kinda, maybe.

The problems are, if not solved, neutralised.

But Kevin Rudd’s biggest problem, the one that remains perhaps insurmountable, is himself.

The electorate returns to K.Rudd, PM, much as Charles Ryder revisited Brideshead in Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel. We’ve been here before. We know all about it.

The notion, posited obliquely on his Lazarus-like re-emergence, that he had learned from his failed premiership and would henceforth be more consultative and less tyrannical, quickly floundered on the announcement of his first major policy.

Labor’s ties to the Gillard disaster were symbolically severed by the largely meaningless announcement that the “carbon tax” would become an “emissions trading scheme” a year ahead of schedule. Except that this political luxury would cost real money, including $1.8 billion to be saved by tightening fringe benefits tax – a move that, incidentally, had carmakers, dealers, and indeed anyone driving a salary-sacrificed company car, screaming blue murder.

Surely anyone consulting broadly – or even narrowly, with cabinet colleagues – would have foreseen the political sensitivity of such a policy. After all, Holden’s tenuous future in Australia had been hardly out of the news for weeks previous.

Surely a quick word to the caucus automotive industry doyenne (and Rudd backer) Kim Carr would have sounded alarm bells about delivering a blow upon a bruise for the ailing sector. Or a quick chat with Wakefield MP Nick Champion (another Rudd backer) might have raised enough words of caution to warrant a reappraisal.

But no. Kevin Rudd was never one for broad consultation.

Even less now, one suspects, that the party’s choice to dismiss him has been proven so flawed and his resurrection has given Labor a genuine, and wholly unwarranted, shot at re-election. Far from being chastened, one would imagine Kevin’s faith in his own counsel has never been stronger.

And what a brilliant masterstroke it must have been that put Labor’s last hope at federal re-election into direct conflict with its last mainland premier.

Days before the official launch of a federal election campaign, Weatherill is effectively telling voters Rudd isn’t serving local interests.

Despite various disagreements with commonwealth policy over the past two years, Jay Weatherill has never felt compelled to turn any into a major spat with the Federal Government, until now. He can do little else; he has hitched his wagon to the Holden Cruze and now, only weeks before Detroit determines the company’s local fate and a mere nine months before SA voters determine his own, his partisan brethren come along and effectively cordon off around 10 per cent of the domestic market.

“What you have got … is a Premier of South Australia who is advocating standing up for South Australia,” says Weatherill.

“Now that has brought me into conflict with the Prime Minister – so be it!”

It’s extraordinary stuff: days before the official launch of a federal election campaign, Weatherill is effectively telling voters Rudd isn’t serving local interests. Which, truth be told, he probably isn’t; federal Labor probably figures now it’s easier to wear the political damage in SA than risk the broader fallout of watering down Rudd’s first policy foray.

Almost everyone in the ALP reckons he would have gone in oblivious to the political ramifications of the FBT changes. More than one has suggested it sounds like some perfectly rational, but politically stupid, Treasury policy that the department’s been pushing for years, being continually rebuffed by more discerning politicians until one came along seeking a swift way to recover a lazy $1.8 billion.

Whatever the case, Rudd is unlikely to waver, for newly resurrected prime ministers are not for turning.

And dissent is not to be tolerated, for, after all, under Rudd we are all to be happy and optimistic and full of positive thoughts and deeds, and criticising ALP policy is none of those things.

As with his divisive asylum seeker policy, Rudd’s motives are there for all to see: to blunt the Abbott Opposition’s sharpest political weapons.

As such, as ever he was, he is the archetypal politician, the consummate campaigner, but narrow and reactive on policy. Perhaps it is true that we get the political leaders we deserve. After all, we have been here before. We should know all about it.

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