Oh, bother it all. This topic is too interesting to be relegated to  the back rooms, and no-one seems to be up to the job of writing a piece. So in the  (new and quite iffy) Pigs Arms tradition, I’m just going to copy someone else’s article and give it my own title. Here’s Annabel Crabb’s piece from the Sydney Morning Herald.

There was wonderment in Caucus when the headline finally broke
That the Nambour Kid was giving it away.
They found out only when he rose, and tremulously spoke,
Instead of in the customary way.

To such a huge Kevelopment would normally accrue
An exordium of heraldry and archers.
But not this time; no hints leaked out, no Twitpic with a clue,
Or tantalising scoop of Peter Hartcher’s.

He stood alone; no team of chums around him all a-simper
Or kids in shirts with Kevin’s name embossed
And ended – not with bangs, but with a well-constructed whimper –
The civil war that everybody lost.

His government now packed away, his Lodge keys handed back
His bureaucrats now resting or retrenched
The Nambour Kid at last gave up the dream of one more crack
At the job from which he twice was cruelly wrenched.

The ”Gotta Zips”, the trips in VIPs, the phone-calls from Barack;
Are now the privilege of his successor.
His red-haired rival’s gone now too, and never coming back.
She’s off to be a visiting professor.

No more trips to high schools, then, with selfie-centred hordes
And miniskirted schoolies shrieking ”KEVIIIINNNNNN!!!”
(So different from the Gillard visits, when – hostile and bored –
They pelted her with sandwiches and devon)

The Kid’s Brisvegas-bound, for now; he wants a quiet life.
He has his new granddaughter, and his health.
And (thanks to early prescience in Kevin’s choice of wife)
He knows the thrill of independent wealth.

This comet leaves a complex trail; some see the Triple A
And recall the ”Sorry” speech that healed a nation.
But others look aloft and see things quite a different way;
All leaky boats, and dodgy insulation.

Historians will one day have a cooler, distant view
Of Kevinism’s arc to death from birth
The rest of us will never quite forget the year or two
When Kevin really was a place on Earth.