Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

My charge around the censure motion is along these lines: it has been not an act of experience—an act of competent foreign policy—but a reckless act to make such an extraordinary statement about the alternative administration of the United States. Secondly, I charge that this Prime Minister has misled the parliament today in trying to pretend that his statement yesterday had nothing to do with a generic attack on the United States Democratic Party.

But there is another matter as well, and it goes to the consistency of this Prime Minister’s parliamentary record. On an earlier occasion this Prime Minister stood at the dispatch box and, in response to a question from his own side, provided the Labor Party and the nation with a lecture about how people should behave. The lecture was along these lines:

Let me say at the outset that criticism of American policy and criticism of the policies of an American President are of course perfectly legitimate for any political leader in Australia, but it is not in our national interest to make that kind of damning, personal, generic statement of criticism of the current President of the United States.

Why not of an alternative President of the United States? He goes on to say that these attitudes were:

... driven more by tribal political considerations than ... by anything else ...

He goes on further to say:

The reality is that the Leader of the Opposition—

at the time—

has allowed his tribal dislike, because of the politics of the current American President, to overwhelm his concern for the national interest. Irrespective of who the president may be, it is never in the interests of this country to have that kind of generic criticism made.

I repeat—out of the Prime Minister’s mouth—this statement:

... it is never in the interests of this country to have that kind of generic criticism made.

Well, Prime Minister, when you say—

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