Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

What a gutless Leader of the House, what a spineless Leader of the House, what a pathetic Leader of the House to not have the courage to allow a censure motion to be properly debated here. Instead he uses this as an opportunity to engage in personal ridicule of the Leader of the Opposition. If you had any guts at all, you would agree to the debate on the censure motion proceeding. You have demonstrated your gutlessness today.

This is a matter of urgency because we do not have a Prime Minister in this parliament anymore; we have the king of cover-up. And that is the essence of the motion which we have sought to have debated in this parliament today. The king of cover-up started his work with Dubai, did his further studies when it came to ‘children overboard’ and did his postgraduate work when it came to pre-war intelligence on Iraq. But I have to say that his post-doctoral work is now done with this ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal and the rorted terms of reference he has provided to the Cole inquiry. This is a cover-up from beginning to end, and any reasonable observer of these events knows it.

Why is it that this Prime Minister is engaging in cover-up? There is one core reason, and that reason sits on the government front bench. It is a very big reason, and its name is Alexander Gosse Downer, whose credibility day by day in the week that has passed—

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