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

How quickly we forget. I remember just three years ago Mr Rudd talked about the blame game and said he would ‘end the blame game’. But there is a new blame game in town and that is Mr Rudd blaming the Senate for all his failures. This goes all the way back to that searing global vision, that propensity to save the world, that the Prime Minister had just three years ago.

He blames the Senate for the failure of his government to put together the ‘pan-Asian union’—I think that is what it was called. It would be the Asian equivalent of the European Union. It failed, of course. Not one Asian country wanted to sign up to it. I read today that South Korea, our closest ally in Asia, also said no. Who will support this? No-one. Remember: this was Mr Rudd’s first grand idea. Nuclear disarmament was his next great idea to save the world. What happened with that? It failed as well. That is no doubt the Senate’s fault as well. He wanted to save the world from nuclear weapons—all the fault of the Senate—the great global vision. You might recall that then he wanted to save the poor old whales from the Japanese. Remember that? It was another part of the global vision. The poor old whales; I hope they did not trust Mr Rudd, because he failed on that as well. He had no impact on the Japanese and their whaling. Again, it was a part of this broad global vision—the pan-Asian union, stop whaling and then nuclear disarmament.

What is perhaps even more embarrassing is his article—which I have here in the chamber, although I do not even like touching it; my hands shake when I touch it—in the Monthly: ‘The global financial crisis’ by Kevin Rudd. In this article, Mr Rudd talks about wanting to ‘redesign’ the world’s economic architecture. This is another part of the global vision. Mr Rudd was going to redesign the international financial architecture. Of course, he could not do that, because the Senate got in his way. It was all the Senate’s fault. I noticed as I was rereading this—I put it near my bed and I read this article quite frequently—