Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to take part in this debate. I woke up on Saturday morning and looked at the Weekend Australian and thought, ‘Gee, overnight, Mr Rudd has announced the death of capitalism.’ I read a bit further and I thought that it got a little bit better because Mr Rudd said that he is going to fix it. Better still, he is going to refashion capitalism in his own image. That made me wonder, because I am no longer sure what Mr Rudd stands for. As my friend Senator Abetz has pointed out, he came to this place as a Christian socialist and used to cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He sometimes described himself as a social democrat. In more recent times leading up to the last election he described himself as an economic conservative.