In what regard. I'm not certain they'll do worse with Rudd, but there are a lot of disadvantages to going that way which I feel the media/this thread gloss over, when most of the senior ministers in of the labor party have publicly disavowed Rudd.
An enormous majority of Labor's problems at the moment stem from two sources. The first is the perception of factional bullies with their snouts in the trough being in charge of the shop. People accept that so long as their is major government that there will always be some corruption and nepotism but like NSW Labor under Kristina Kenneally, this Gillard/Swan leadership allows factional hacks like Stephen Conroy and Tony Burke to openly flaunt it. From recollection the members of the ministry who truly roasted Rudd (as opposed to said they would prefer Gillard) were Swan, Crean, Conroy, Roxon, Ellis, Emerson and Burke. Whilst Emerson despite his recent antics is a gifted debater with a sound grasp of economics, the rest are hardly great government asset. Never mind that Turnbull, Hockey, Mcfarlane, Costello and Hewson have all jumped on the record to call Abbott a joke. But the point is a return to Rudd would be a repudiation of this perceived "government by faceless men" and the fact that a bunch of unpopular, factional heavies said that they dislike Rudd doesn't especially work against him all things considered.
The second major problem Labor has is a perceived lack of authority in Gillard's leadership. It comes from a number of factors, the site of Paul Howes boasting about how the factions have put her in power on the night of the 2010 spill didn't help, the whole "don't think of me as a leader, think of me as the friendly girl next door" act that she pulled upon taking the leadership, the hung parliament, the accord with the Greens and the national conference vote on gay marriage have left her bereft of any real authority as a Prime Minister. Politics is all about voters that the government can be trusted to make responsible decisions, when you have a presidential, dictatorial figure like John Howard or Kevin Rudd as leader this essentially makes it the rather simple task of convincing voters that they can trust the Prime Minister. In Gillard's case though she has the enormous task of persuading voters that they can trust her, Christine Milne, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, Paul Howes, Sam Datsyari and about twenty other factional heavies. You can see from Tony Abbott's dire opinion poll ratings that the electorate is deeply reluctant to have him as Prime Minister yet they are so desperate for a clear chain of command that they are still overwhelmingly saying that they will vote Liberal. But if Rudd is returned that clear chain of command will come with him. The equation will change dramatically, voters will be adjudging whether whom they trust more to manage the economy, foreign relations etc, Rudd or Abbott. And you can cling desperately to your belief that opinion polls are misleading but there is no more scientific way of modelling results, your anecdotal claims are weak by comparison.
The ambassador to China said Rudd was a huge embarrassment to relations with china and japan
I think that might have been the former ambassador. At any rate my understanding is that Rudd had an extremely poor personal relationship with DFAT officials. This stems from the fact that more of less for all time, DFAT have been able to ride roughshod of the politicians who have never had the sort of foreign policy knowledge to come remotely close to rivaling them. Rudd is obviously someone with immense knowledge of Foreign Affairs and a fairly heavy handed approach to his work remains pretty much the only politician to ever challenge the expertise of DFAT and they were deeply resentful of the fact. I'll wager quite a bit that the in private the Indonesian diplomats said much worse about John .