George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Quite right, Senator McGauran. The Labor Party, who must have known what he was like, sat mute and defended the indefensible. Let it not be forgotten that these are the people who wanted to make Mark Latham Prime Minister in 2004 and told us how good he was, until he was found out by the Australian people. They knew what Kevin Rudd was like too, but this time the con trick worked. This time, the Leader of the Labor Party was not found out before the election in the way that Mr Mark Latham had been.

What we have had over the Easter recess is what I call the ‘Mark Latham moment’—the moment when the penny dropped with the Australian people that Kevin Rudd was not what he represented himself to be, that Kevin Rudd was as cynical a politician as god ever put breath into. That moment came, in particular, when Mr Rudd humiliatingly and comprehensively abandoned, for electoral reasons, what he had only four months earlier described as ‘the greatest moral, social and economic challenge of our time’—the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.