Kevin’s loss is our gain

It might be bad news for Kevin Rudd as he slinks out of the lodge with his tail between his legs. But guess what? We get the real Therese back. Remember the entrepreneur Therese Rein? That smart, savvy businesswoman who was a pin-up for Australian female entrepreneurs?

Over the past three years she morphed from striding around the world stage building a global business into a goody two-shoes Prime Minister’s wife who never opened her mouth. Oh, she made exceptions when talking about her causes.

And don’t get me wrong. This energetic woman took on many great causes and became patron of very worthy organisations, among them The Australian Common Ground Alliance to develop a housing model for the chromic homelessness and the indigenous Literacy Project, providing reading materials to remote indigenous communities.

But a lot of the time she spent in the public eye was as Kevin’s wife, standing slightly to his left, nodding vigorously and smiling broadly as Rudd spoke. She was also busy being a role model mother, climbing Mt Kilimanjaro with son Nicholas and making sure that teenager Marcus received enough attention to compensate for a busy and distracted PM father.

And then of course, the poor woman suffered the appalling scrutiny of an image obsessed media that spied on her in the gym and demanded she stop dressing in pastels that made her look frumpy.

Don’t for a minute think that Therese stopped being an entrepreneur. Yes, she was forced to divest of the Australian arm of her successful business Ingeus due to the conflict of interest and rightly so. Many of its contracts came from the Federal Government.

But she has expanded the global side of the business and won two new major contracts from the British Government to supply employment services to counties in central England and Scotland; contracts worth, on the estimate of one competitor, about $500 million.

In March this year she featured on SmartCompany’s successful female entrepreneurs list with revenue at $120 million.

The problem is she had to do all of that discreetly and secretly. She had to keep her mouth shut about her success. She has not been able to talk about her business. She has not been able to act as a role model to other female entrepreneurs – and we need that in this country where successful female entrepreneurs are as scarce as hens teeth. And she has been denied the satisfaction of creating more jobs in Australia, changing the industry, building skills – and all the other bibs and bobs that make entrepreneurs proud.

It has also hurt her business. According to a report in The Age Ingeus suffered a $9.4 million loss for 2008-09, a big turnaround from the $15.2 million profit she enjoyed in 07-08. I have no doubt that if she had kept the Australian operations, there would have been a different story to tell.

So here is my hope. Rudd will stay on the backbench even after what is looking increasingly like an August election. With his poor reputation for management it will be political suicide to think he could be put in charge of a ministry and not receive a savage beating from the press. Once he realises his time is over, he will leave politics altogether like a sulky Peter Costello. That means we could have the confident entrepreneur Therese Rein back by the end of the year.

And she will be brimming with new ideas. A woman like that has not spent the last three years planning dinner parties and buying new shoes. She will also no doubt keep up her charitable good work as well. Rein was always a passionate advocate of those in need long before Rudd became PM.

And in my view that’s all great news. For Rein is a lot more useful to the Australian entrepreneur community than Rudd is to politics.