Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and the Prime Minister has waited a very, very long time to get his revenge. It is almost six years now since he was brought down by the former Prime Minister in a leadership spill late in the year, almost in the dead of night, but the bad blood between these two men, the Prime Minister and the former Prime Minister, goes back much further than that. It goes back at least 16 years, to when they were opposite each other in the republic debate, when the former Prime Minister defeated the now Prime Minister on the issue of the republic, cost Australia a republic and broke the nation's heart.

But it goes back even further than that. I have recently stumbled upon an article that the new Prime Minister wrote 37 years ago in The Bulletin of 7 February 1978, when he was a journalist. In this article he gives a free character analysis of the former Prime Minister. Reporting about an AUS conference, he says:

The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn't really deserve.

It is almost as if it could have been written this week, isn't it?

So he had the motive: revenge. He had the argument, because by any objective analysis this has been a pretty ordinary government for the last two years, a government which has made lots of mistakes and broken lots of promises. But the thing that he fails to recognise is that he has been part of that government and that a lot of those broken promises have been his—broken promises on the ABC, broken promises on SBS and broken promises on the NBN. This is the now Prime Minister's election policy on the NBN that he took to the last election in 2013.

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