IF BOOK sales measure opinion, then Labor’s Kevin Rudd would count as the single most unpopular prime minister in Australian history.
Despite a landslide election victory in 2007, coupled with record high opinion polls for his first 18 months in office, the 26th prime minister’s memoirs have flatlined.
Mr Rudd wrote the largest personal account ever published by an Australian prime minister and released it in two instalments: Not for the Faint Hearted in 2017 and The PM Years the following year.
The first sold 8260 copies and the second 5750 – among the lowest selling prime ministerial memoirs in the nation’s history. By comparison, a children’s book he co-authored in 2010, Jasper + Abby, has reached sales of 6020.
HOWARD
The highest selling political memoir so far this century, and the second most popular of all time, was Lazarus Rising written by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard and released in 2010.
His 700 plus page hard cover has sold 105,400 copies to date.
The most popular political memoir of all time, however, was Gough Whitlam’s personal account of his 1975 dismissal, The Truth of the Matter. It is reported to have sold more than 150,000 copies to date and is currently in its third re-print.
Third on the all-time best seller list is Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s tome, The Hawke Memoirs, which has sold about 80,000 copies since its release in hard cover and paperback in 1994.
Fourth is Julia Gillard’s My Story released in 2019. Being Australia’s first female prime minister, the former Labor leader’s memoirs have proven popular, selling 76,740 copies to date.
ABBOTT
Malcolm Turnbull’s A Bigger Picture, which was released earlier this year, has sold a respectable 55,280 copies. Though experts do not predict his sales will surpass Gillard’s.
Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Labor counterpart Paul Keating have yet to pen their memoirs.
Australia’s longest serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, wrote two memoirs, however, sales figures are not available.
It’s understood they did not sell as well as anticipated.PC
Rudd is the great deceiver. He pretended to be Howard-lite before the 2007 election but turned out to be the most harmful, nation hating trickster in Australian history. He deserves to be despised.
I have a lot of respect for Malcolm Turnbull; he was, after all, our second female prime minister.