The requited love of opinion polls for Kevin Rudd continues to cool but the Prime Minister may have suffered an even more hurtful rejection.
Some 50,000,mainly fellow Queenslanders,at the cauldron of the common man and woman,Lang Park,gave Rudd the biggest boo of his life at Friday's NRL season opener between the Brisbane Broncos and the North Queensland Cowboys.
Being televised live,it was the jeer heard,if not around the nation,then at least down the entire east coast and four days later it was still joyously resonating around yesterday's Coalition party room like some kind of Mexican boo.
Not only was Rudd panned,a Coalition spokesman said after a joint parties meeting,but the Prime Minister had arrived when the game was''half over''. Further,he seemed to spend most of his time on his mobile.
''The last prime minister to be booed at Lang Park was Gough Whitlam,''the Coalition spokesman said.''Hawke never was and Keating never went.''
It was pure kismet surely that such a rude reference to Paul Keating's underwhelming interest in rugby league coincided with his decision to unload on the Opposition Leader,Tony Abbott.
The ghost of governments past bobbed up on ABC Radio National to congratulate himself on the 20th anniversary of his superannuation initiatives but could not help himself from spear-tackling Abbott.
"He turned up in the last couple of years when I was prime minister. I used to regard him as a sort of resident nutter on their side,''Keating recalled.
''If Tony Abbott ends up the prime minister of Australia,you've got to say,God help us … truly an intellectual nobody and … no policy ambition. Is that all there is? You know the song?''
Having asked the musical question,Keating decided to help listeners by singing the opening line of the chorus of Peggy Lee's 1969 hitIs That All There Is?.