If Kevin Rudd is elected Prime Minister, he now has to find jobs for two ex-Premiers, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks, and one who has signaled he is stepping down in the near future, Queensland’s Peter Beattie.

All three played a significant role in the filleting of Kim Beazley in December last year, with Carr and Beattie callously sticking the knife into their mate Beazley when it seemed he could not close the gap with John Howard.

Carr, who is a handsomely paid political adviser to Macquarie Bank, is likely to succeed Denis Richardson as Ambassador to Washington while Beattie would fancy hitting the diplomatic trail with a posting to, say, Beijing or Tokyo, where he is something of a sunny favourite.

This leaves the problem of what to give Bracks. Although he tired of the premiership and was glad to get out while he was in front, Bracks has years of public service in front of him. Some are suggesting a major water authority role or running one of Rudd’s new federal commissions on planning and development.

Then there is Beazley. He will step down at the election and will be footloose and fancy free. For behaving with honor and dignity – i.e. keeping his mouth shut and resisting the urge to “do a Mark Latham” – Beazley will also be in line for a diplomatic post or a senior university post. His vast knowledge of defence policy means he could be on call to sort out the incalculable damage done to the armed forces and the Defence Department by that spikey-haired crazy guy, Brendan Nelson.

After his election in 1996, Howard carried out a policy of ethnic cleansing on the commonwealth public service, sacking or sidelining anyone with a hint of Laborism or Keatingism on their file. He replaced them with the greatest conga-line of spineless hand-raisers that the public service has ever seen.

Rudd and his key advisers will keep the small number of competent people and dismiss the Howard time-servers, so there will be plenty of jobs if the Ruddster scrapes over the line.

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