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

Of course, Senator Bushby, if he was a man of courage, he would call a double dissolution on the issue. But it is not likely now. What the Australian people have discovered about Kevin Rudd is that for him promises have no meaning. Do not worry about core promises and non-core promises. There are no such things as core promises in the Rudd government; there are merely expendable words—words that get you from one news cycle to the next but contain no integrity, no commitment and no purpose.

This government must be such a disappointment to its supporters, to those who serve as its ministers and those who serve as its apologists on the backbench. You must have known about this man—this man you elected as leader in extremis when you had run out of other options four years ago. The Australian people have now woken up to the fact that he cannot be trusted, that nothing he says can be believed, that he stands for nothing, that he has no core values, that he has no guiding philosophy, that he has no policy courage, that he is a hollow man and a hollow political leader.

This is the first Australian Prime Minister in the lifetime of anybody in this chamber today—and I am sorry to say this about a Prime Minister of this great country—about whom one must say has a character problem. You would not have said that about John Howard, loathe him or love, nor would you have said it about Paul Keating, Bob Hawke, Malcolm Fraser or Gough Whitlam, or any Australian Prime Minister I can remember. Regardless of what you thought of his policies, regardless of what you thought of his style of government, every Australian Prime Minister on both sides of politics I can remember in my lifetime was a person of character, a person steadfast in their beliefs, whatever those beliefs may have been. This man has no steadfastness in his beliefs because he has no beliefs. He has no core values and his commitment to any sense of values is nominal, transitory and temporary. He is a politician who lives from news cycle to news cycle. The hollow man, caricatured on ABC television, now leads a government tainted forever in the public mind and to be forever condemned in Australian history as the government led by the man who stood for nothing.