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

My question is to the Prime Minister and refers to his answer to my previous question. I refer to the text of the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday, which he has reaffirmed in the parliament today. I quote from it:

If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.

Prime Minister, how can you credibly say to the parliament today that your statement yesterday referred only to Senator Obama when, in fact, you explicitly attacked the Democratic Party as a whole?

John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can answer by referring to numerous occasions when the current President of the United States has been attacked personally by members who sit opposite, and then in their next breath they have said that some of their best friends are Republicans. I was not generically attacking the Democrats but, the last time I checked, Senator Obama was a member of the Democratic Party of the United States. I say to those who sit opposite: apparently it is all right for those who sit opposite to attack the Bush administration; apparently it is all right for the Leader of the Opposition to hold out to the Australian public that he would serve as foreign minister under a Labor Prime Minister in Mark Latham, who attacked not only George Bush’s policies on Iraq but also his character and his competence. When the Leader of the Opposition was asked in February 2003 whether he agreed with what Mark Latham had to say, he said, ‘It was an exercise in free speech.’ Yet this morning on national television the Leader of the Opposition said, ‘I had a little word to him privately to let him know what I really thought.’ That is not good enough—what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The reality is that the Labor Party and the Leader of the Opposition are being two-faced on this issue. It is all right to attack Bush and when it suits you the Republicans, but, if I say anything critical of somebody on the other side of politics, I am interfering in American domestic politics. I am doing nothing of the kind and I do not retract anything I have said.