By Jacqueline Maley
Prime ministers spend large amounts of time talking about jobs, their importance to the economy and to self-worth. They like frequently to assert the necessity of the welfare dependent to find a job and keep it.
So it is a cruel irony that prime ministers themselves are so ill-equipped at functioning without a job, and so bad at finding a new one.
Once the electorate has kicked them out of office, they go quite mad.
It may be the clearest sign yet that prime ministers, are, in fact, just like the rest of us. Up to a point any way.
Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd. It seems prime ministers find joblessness harder to accept.Credit: Andrew Meares
Normal people respond to sudden unemployment with mild depression. Some develop a co-dependency with their couch. Others may give themselves a dose or two of pinot poisoning.
But most eventually dust off the resumé and get back out there.
Prime ministers find joblessness harder to accept. They respond with hyperactivity and in some cases, emotional vituperation disguised as "policy critique".
This week has seen our most recently deposed prime minister, Tony Abbott, try to threat-plead his way into a new job via the unusual resume-submission method of a tabloid newspaper column.
Illustration: Cathy Wilcox
Not that he wrote the column, mind. That would be undignified. He got a friend to write it for him – his old pal Cate McGregor, the retired senior army officer. McGregor informed readers that Abbott is not enjoying his sideline-sniping at Malcolm Turnbull, any more than we are.
He's doing it only because he is feeling rudderless. He needs a gig.
The best way to shut him up would be to return him to cabinet, specifically to the Indigenous Affairs portfolio.
If you think that sounds a bit like emotional blackmail, you're wrong.
The former prime minister is only being "pragmatic", McGregor says.
"Abbott actually believes that the solidarity imposed upon him by the cabinet is the best insurance against his being deemed a wrecker," she writes, missing the obvious fact that the best insurance against being deemed a wrecker is to not wreck stuff.
"Only the discipline of the cabinet can completely align Abbott with his own avowed mission, the re-election of this government."
The "only" at the beginning of that sentence should strike fear into the heart of the Turnbull camp.
Except that, if another former prime minister is to be believed, Turnbull and his camp have no heart into which to strike fear.
Kevin Rudd this week wrote a column for Fairfax Media condemning Turnbull for his newly toughened asylum seeker policy.
Turnbull said the Coalition will ban people held on Manus Island and Nauru, as well as any fresh unfortunate who attempts to seek asylum in Australia, from ever entering our country.
Despite his employment at an Asian policy think tank Rudd appears somewhat idle, especially after Turnbull refused to act as referee for the United Nations gig he had spent his entire life resumé-building for.
It is hard to know how to respond to such treachery, played out literally on a global scale, but if anyone is emotionally equipped to seek vengeance for it, it's Kevin Rudd.
Turnbull's plan, Rudd wrote, takes asylum seeker policy to "new lows".
Being Rudd, he doesn't make his points quickly, but he does make some that many would agree with.
He writes that Turnbull's new stance is not sound policy but an exercise in throwing "red meat at the right, including the Hansonite insurgency", and that Turnbull is "grovel [ling] to the broad politics of xenophobia".
Strong words, which raised the sceptical eyebrows of those who remembered Rudd's asylum seeker policy, announced before the 2013 election, in which he pledged those asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru would never be resettled in Australia.
As pointed out by my colleague Tony Wright, Rudd spent much of his column retrospectively resumé-doctoring so as not to appear hypocritical.
The effect was to somewhat undermine his moral authority, and to call into question his job readiness for anything other than being a pest.
As John Howard and Paul Keating have shown us, legacy defence is so much easier to pull off when your legacy is a sound one.
Both Abbott and Rudd could do worse than follow the lead of the woman and other former prime minister they spent so much time tearing down.
An outlier among the jobless PM cohort, Julia Gillard has gone overseas to take up gainful employment as an advocate for girls' education.
She was recently photographed with Rihanna – something that is very unlikely to happen to either Rudd or Abbott on current projections.
Unemployed and unmoored, and without the good sense to take up a practical hobby, both our most recently sacked prime ministers are unlikely to get a real job any time soon.