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

He did not follow the Billy Hughes dictum; he actually joined the Country Party. But that was back in the days when I grew up on a farm in rural Queensland and when the Country Party stood for something. That was when the Country Party stood for standing up for the country against the city based Liberals. They stood up for rural Australia in those days. This was the party of Black Jack McEwen. My father always told me as a kid that, at the end of the day, you could depend on the Country Party to go out there and argue your case. That was back in the sixties. That was before they sided with the city based Liberals—to do what? Sell off Telstra. They sided with the city based Liberals to simply become a subset of city based Liberal politics and philosophy right across the board.

None of the spirit of Black Jack McEwen is alive in this mob today. None of the spirit of even Doug Anthony is alive in this mob today. That is why Doug has basically said that the show is over as well. But the rot really set in in the eyes of all rural and regional Australia when the Country Party, later called the National Party, said, ‘We’re going to roll over on Telstra.’ Can you imagine any previous leader of the National Party or the Country Party ever saying to his constituency out there, right across this great, vast country of ours, that we are going to support the privatisation of Telstra, Telecom or the Postmaster General? Could you ever believe that any previous National Party leader would simply roll over and say, ‘Tickle my tummy’? That is exactly what happened—‘Tickle my tummy.’

When you unpack it all and look at how many times the Nats have folded to the Libs, the pattern of behaviour is simply consistent. There is a fundamental schism at work here. When you stack it up on a piece of paper, the National Party is supposed to stand for opposing unbridled free market principles as it impacts on rural working families. If you unpack it all, that is what they are supposed to stand for. Yet they have somehow teamed up with this mob—Peter Costello’s Liberal Party or the Liberal Party which Peter Costello would like to have—a party whose philosophy is this: there shall be no break on the market, there shall be no intervention on the market, and when it comes to any part of the country, city or country, let the principles of the market rule. There is such a deep philosophical chasm between what the Country Party used to stand for and what the Liberal Party still stands for. But what has the Country Party, now the National Party, done instead? Instead of arguments of political principle and basic principle, it has simply hauled up the white flag and said, ‘Over to you, Pete.’

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