Mum, cabbie, minister top Australia's 2010 losers list (Feature)

By Sid Astbury Dec 16, 2010, 6:48 GMT

Sydney - Lady Gaga songs were the most played on Australian radio, Oprah Winfrey was the country's most important visitor, racing car driver Mark Webber was its richest sports star and iron-ore digger Gina Rinehart looked set to end 2010 with the most improved bank balance.

The year also saw Julia Gillard become not only Australia's first female prime minister but also the first unmarried and faithless person to hold that office. Actors Jackie Weaver, Geoffrey Rush and Nicole Kidman did the nation proud by earning Oscar nominations, and Sydney fireman Duncan West was crowned world pole dancing champion 11 months after taking up the sport.

But life always has its losers, and 2010 was a banner year with a neglectful mother hospitalizing her tots with sunburn, a taxi driver exposing himself to passengers and a foreign minister getting himself rated a bumbling control freak by fellow diplomats.

The careless parent, who was not named in court for legal reasons, had her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter taken into care and a conviction recorded after she let her children play on the beach until their skin blistered so badly that both were treated in hospital and one was put in a burns suit.

Cab driver Mohamad Tohme was named Sydney's worst taxi driver after being sacked by four taxi firms for hitting, cheating, abusing and swearing at his passengers and assaulting police. Tome finally had his licence taken away after slapping one passenger and dropping his pants and exposing himself to another.

'I've got maybe bad people skills,' the cabbie from hell conceded after a tribunal decided he was 'not a fit and proper person to drive a taxi cab.'

Which brings us to Kevin Rudd, who began 2010 with opinion polls showing him the most popular prime minister and ended the year demoted to Gillard's foreign minister and, like Tohme, being publicly upbraided for his lack of 'people skills.'

The Mandarin-speaking Rudd became the first leader in Australian history not to see out a first term and then, courtesy of WikiLeaks, be humiliated with the release of a US diplomatic cable that noted his 'tedious and bureaucratic jargon' and answers in Parliament that made him 'look evasive and out of his depth.'

Sam Roggeveen, a research fellow at Sydney's Lowy Institute, a private think tank, marveled at Rudd's ability to withstand such a public flogging.

'How many of us could psychologically overcome the kind of repudiation Rudd's suffered this year, not only from colleagues but the media and now the US embassy?' Roggeveen asked. 'It's been withering and intensely personal, and it's a wonder he's functioning at all.'

Gillard, who deposed Rudd in June and went on to win office in her own right two months later, defended the fallen leader.

'Kevin Rudd's a man who throughout his adult life has devoted himself to expertise in foreign policy,' she said. 'He's bringing that expertise to bear for the Australian nation and doing an absolutely first-class job.'

Rudd himself is a model of resilience and resolution.

'It's water off a duck's back,' he told reporters. 'I don't frankly give a damn about this sort of thing. You just get on with it.'

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