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CANBERRA - Kevin Rudd's honeymoon has come to a sharp halt as the Government prepares to step up its attack over the new Labor leader's contacts with a corrupt former premier of Western Australia.
Rudd has admitted meeting Brian Burke three times in 2005, at a time when contacts between Burke and ministers of the state Labor Government had been banned.
While Rudd maintains the meetings were innocent and no more than manners to a federal Opposition MP who has invited him to the meetings, the Government has attacked the Labor leader's character and suggested he wanted to use Burke to round up votes for a future challenge to then-leader Kim Beazley.
But the Government has also had to sacrifice one of its own senior members after Human Services Minister Senator Ian Campbell admitted meeting Burke last year, and resigned.
Rudd's problems have come after a series of opinion polls voted him above Prime Minister John Howard as preferred leader, and gave the Opposition a comfortable lead in the two-party preferred vote that decides elections under Australia's preferential voting system.
His lunch, coffee and dinner meetings with Burke - when Rudd was foreign affairs spokesman - are the first serious blow he has suffered since becoming leader late last year.
But they have allowed Howard to savage Rudd at the start of an election year.
Burke was WA Premier at the time of the scandal known as WA Inc, when the state Government made a series of deals with businessmen such as Alan Bond during the boom of the 1980s.
The deals cost Labor state office, put Burke, Bond and a number of others behind bars, and handed government to the Liberals for about a decade.
Burke set up a lobbying business with Julian Grill, another former Labor minister from the WA Inc days, and the pair developed an astonishing network of contacts that extended into the Cabinet office.
Direct contact between Burke and Grill and state ministers was banned until the present Premier, Alan Carpenter, took office and the embargo was lifted,
Burke and Grill's activities - which included access to secret Cabinet papers, debates and decisions - are now the subject of an investigation by the WA Crime and Corruption Commission.
Among his specialties was rounding up votes on issues important to his clients, opening the way for Government claims that Rudd wanted his support for his eventual - successful - challenge against Beazley.
The scandal has cost the jobs of four state ministers so far.
Rudd's explanation that he met Burke at the behest of federal Labor MP Graeme Edwards and that he did not know of the WA ban on contact with Burke has been ridiculed by the Government.
An invitation to a dinner for 205 people, at which Rudd spoke, also surfaced. The invitation was extended to guests by Burke and Grill.
Edwards said yesterday that Rudd attended the dinner at his request and that it did not involve leadership of the Labor Party.
But Rudd was called a liar in Parliament last week by Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, and subjected to a stinging attack by Treasurer Peter Costello.
"Anyone who deals with Brian Burke is morally and politically compromised," he said.
That remark rebounded on the Government at the weekend, when the Australian newspaper revealed that Campbell had met Burke for 20 minutes last year.
Campbell met Burke last June to discuss an indigenous cultural centre that was to be part of a redevelopment of property along the Swan River in Perth.
Howard was forced to dump him to clear his own party of the Burke taint.
But Labor frontbencher Stephen Smith told ABC TV's Insiders programme yesterday that Campbell's resignation was a short-term political fix to allow the attacks on Rudd to continue - a "clever short-term political fix".
