Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I encourage the opposition to go to the next election with the slogan ‘Kevin Rudd doesn’t work hard’ or ‘Kevin Rudd is a part-time Prime Minister’! That shows that they are in touch with where the Australian public are! Have a look at what our agenda was for the first 100 days. We are about achieving that agenda. This mob have absolutely nothing to say. It is extraordinary. Can you imagine them sitting around in their tactics groups? ‘Will we raise climate change?’ ‘No. We can’t talk about that because, remember, we denied it existed.’ ‘Will we talk about Work Choices?’ ‘No. That’s the policy that dare not speak its name.’ ‘Will we talk about housing?’ ‘No. We didn’t have a housing minister.’ ‘Will we talk about infrastructure?’ ‘No. We can’t talk about that because we didn’t have an infrastructure minister or an infrastructure plan.’ ‘What actually can we talk about?’ ‘Maybe education?’ ‘No, because we trashed education because we reduced funding for higher education because we had an ideological obsession and became more and more extreme.’

I wonder why they object to this. You do not have to take my word for it; take their word for it. They were all out there on Four Corners on Monday night—the member for North Sydney, the member for Mayo, the member for Higgins—talking about how they got it so wrong. We know that in the lead-up to the election on 24 November last year they actually were not talking about how they could defeat Kevin Rudd because they had conceded that they could not; they were talking about how they could get rid of John Howard. And they did not have the ticker to actually do that.

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