Shouts from the desert

Rudd is coming under fire for hand picking candidates, but while what he is doing might not make the local party members happy, the choices he is making are far better than is likely to come from the party machine. Rudd is hand picking candidates for all kinds of seats &emdash; from reasonably safe ALP seats like Brand to marginal seats like Eden-Monaro and long term Liberal seats like Bennelong &emdash; and the candidates he is picking have the skills that are needed to do a good job as an MP.

Take Colonel Mike Kelly as an example. Rudd has picked Kelly as his candidate for the bellweather seat of Eden-Monaro. As a senior military lawyer he has the legal and organisational skills to do an excellent job in Parliament, and international policy skills that will be highly valuable to a Government. Unlike the Liberal Cabinet, who had no military experience whatsoever when they made the strategically disastrous decision to participate in the invasion of Iraq, Kelly is likely to better understand the limitations of intelligence gathering and the limitations on what can be achieved through the use of military power.

Local preselection rarely produces candidates like this &emdash; they prefer political time servers who have spent years cultivating relationships within a party over people who have had their head down getting the knowledge and experience needed to do the job.

Rudd's choices are not just about putting in candidates who can win seats - they are about putting in place people who can do the job. That is a refreshing change in the Australian political scene, and one we should all support.