Look, I’ve never done this, but so disgusted was I by that debate on Wednesday that I thought I’d bypass the interview this morning that we normally do at this time and tell you, out of a duty to our country, what the debate didn’t ask and didn’t tell us.

A listener wrote to me to quote Kevin Rudd’s speech to the Parliament on 11 November 1998 in which he said, amongst other things, “If politics is just managerial decision-making then politics becomes little more than theatre, a public performance necessary to convince the shareholders at the AGM that the company needs new management”.

Well as the listener wrote and said, “Alan, we have the most important AGM coming up on the 7th of September and we hope the people will have a chance to vote for some new management.

“But we’d better make sure it’s genuinely new management, not old management putting on a theatrical performance pretending to be new.”

It was that theatrical performance that prompted me to make some observations today.

It’s only last week that Tony Abbott made some comment about a female having sex appeal.

Red-blooded Australian men think, “Good on him, he’s a fair dinkum Australian”.

Women think, “I wish someone had told me I had sex appeal”.

What did Kevin Rudd think, “This one’s pretty odd, to be blunt. If any male employer pointed to any female staff member and said ‘This person’s a good member because they’ve got sex appeal’, the employer would be finding themselves in serious strife”.

This is a bloke lecturing, last week, Tony Abbott about sexism.

This is a bloke who got plastered at a New York strip club and was allegedly asked to leave after inappropriate behaviour.

A bloke who attended the 80th birthday party of Bob Hawke at which a stripper performed in a John Howard mask.

A bloke whose abuse made an RAAF stewardess cry.

And we’re getting a moral lecture from Rudd and we now have the make-up artist for Wednesday night’s debate indicating how rude Kevin Rudd was to her.

Well I was in a television studio yesterday afternoon and I was being made-up also for a broadcast last night and I raised this point with the make-up artist.

She said, “Don’t talk to me. This bloke has been in here and he’s a pig”.

This is Kevin Rudd, delivering lectures to everyone on everything.

Well these are things that the debate didn’t tell us and we’re entitled to know.

And you’ve been writing to me in the light of several comments I’ve made and saying well come on, say it again.

Well, here we go, about a bloke who brought notes to the first debate.

Tony Abbott’s answer to that fiasco and the cheating allegations was spot on when he said the real issue was the notes weren’t worth reading.

He said the problem with the Prime Minister was not that he was reading from notes, it’s more that the notes weren’t worth reading.

That was the problem.

Well, what didn’t the debates tell us.

Let me take firstly all these promises that Kevin Rudd is going to make.

Yesterday he was talking to the union movement and he said that we’re in the building business, that Abbott is in the tearing down business.

Good comment.

Building what?

Building debt, I’ll come to that in a minute.

Building failure, I’ll come to that in a moment.

Building a catalogue of lies, I’ll come to that too.

What about building a library of broken promises.

2007 and Kevin Rudd promised, but wasn’t challenged in any debate, a home insulation plan.

It was dumped after four young men died and businesses were sent broke.

He promised a citizens’ assembly to talk about climate change.

It was dumped.

He promised cash for clunkers, we were going to get all your cars that were environmentally unfriendly and he’d buy them back, cash for clunkers, it was dumped.

He promised an emissions trading scheme, remember, well, he abandoned that in a hurry.

He promised digital set-top boxes and we found they were cheaper at Harvey Norman’s.

He promised a mining tax but it returned no money.

He promised computers in schools but it was finished after a 1.4 billion dollar blowout, fewer than half were delivered.

He promised a green loans programme, well only three and a half per cent of the promised loans were delivered.

It was abandoned.

If you want to be environmentally friendly, we’ll grant you a loan.

Taxpayers’ money.

Santa Claus will look after you.

It was abandoned.

Similarly with a solar homes and communities plan.

It was shut down after a half billion dollar blowout.

Remember this is a bloke lecturing to Tony Abbott in the so-called debate on Wednesday night.

He promised a green car innovation fund, we don’t want these environmentally unfriendly cars, we’ll build green cars.

It was abandoned.

He promised retooling for climate change, if business out there wants to become more environmentally friendly, we’ll fund you.

That was abandoned.

He promised child care centres, that was abandoned.

260 promised, only 38 delivered.

This is the bloke who hasn’t been challenged on any of this stuff.

This is the record.

He promised to take a meat axe to the public service.

That was abandoned.

There are now 24,000 more public servants than when he became Prime Minister the first time.

He promised Fuel Watch, it was abandoned.

He promised Grocery Watch, it was abandoned.

He promised a national schools solar programme, oh we’ll save the schools on their energy bill.

Well it was abandoned two years early.

He promised a solar hot water rebate, save electricity bills, put solar panels on your roof and we’ll give you a rebate on the cost, abandoned.

He promised 64 GP super clinics, 11 delivered.

He promised Defence family health care clinics, 12 promised, none delivered.

He promised trade training centres, 2,650 promised, 70 operational and abandoned.

He promised to limit the debt ceiling to 250 billion dollars.

We’re heading beyond 300 billion.

He promised poker machine reform, remember, that’s how they bought the vote of Andrew Wilkie, abandoned.

Now we have of course a fringe benefits tax on the motor vehicle industry and people out of work.

Now we have a tax on bank deposits.

Well why don’t we hear about any of this?

This is the record.

Why none of this in the debate.

Where are the cheer squad in the gallery.

He promised that he wouldn’t touch superannuation, not one jot, not one tittle.

Following the election there were at least ten changes to superannuation under the Rudd and Gillard Governments.

And the latest is this phased in employer contribution from 9 per cent to 12 per cent when the employers don’t have the money.

Now he promises he’ll create high tech industry hubs designed to generate tens of thousands of new jobs, 12 will be in Sydney.

The form guide says we’ve been down this track before.

Then of course there’s the asylum seeker issue.

He’s the architect of the shambles.

And of course no one seems to know what deal he did with the Papua New Guinean Prime Minister.

But the Papua New Guinean Prime Minister says they can only accommodate 3,000 this year on Manus Island and we’ve already reached that limit.

And Christmas Island is close to capacity.

More lives are being placed in jeopardy.

Our border protection personnel continue to risk their lives.

And all Mr Rudd can do is mock Tony Abbott’s aim of stopping the boats.

Iran, the largest source of boat people landing in Australia this year, failed to send a representative to Bali this week to even discuss the matter with Bob Carr and Tony Burke.

Carr and Burke will have to talk with junior officials from Pakistan and Thailand.

As the Australian newspaper said this week, there has to be an end to this phoney war.

It said, “It’s ridiculous to suppose our modern defence force can’t find an effective means of preventing small vessels entering our territorial waters”.

And it said, “It will not be enough on its own but the action carries a symbolic force that will resonate around the region.”

But then the Australian editorial made this point.

“Five weeks after Mr Rudd invited acclaim for the PNG arrangement it’s showing the characteristic flaws of his political style: a melodramatic announcement, a flurry of activity and a Prime Ministerial reprimand for anyone who doubts the efficacy of the scheme.

“Follow-up, reassessment and review are left to officials. When holes start to open up, Mr Rudd moves on to other things.”

The editorial said, “With a challenge like border security that calls for dogged and unshakeable resolve, it’s the worst possible approach”.

Well, as Tony Abbott said at the end of the so-called debate on Wednesday night, you need someone you can trust.

You also need someone with dogged and unshakeable resolve.

And that someone is Abbott.

But then of course as the Daily Telegraph said this week, if there are so many Moaning Mikes and Despairing Debbies out there who are frightened by the prospect of an incoming Coalition Government led by Tony Abbott, then Labor should have no difficulty finding them.

But instead of relating the views of real people, Kevin Rudd uses in his ads an actress to portray Sour Susie speaking scripted lines about alleged Coalition concerns.

The editorial asked, “Is this the new way promised by Prime Minister Rudd”

As the Telegraph rightly said, “It’s one of the oldest advertising strategies in the political playbook, used since the dawn of television”.

But it says, “The voices of actual Australians speaking passionately and off the cuff are far more interesting. And this week the Guardian Australia, normally a paper of the left, went out amongst the voters in western Sydney and allowed people to speak their minds.

“And what did they say? Universal concern over asylum seeker arrivals and the state of the economy, both a consequence of Kevin Rudd’s Government.”

Peter Beattie, not a question on him in the debate.

He was the gun candidate.

Well the Courier-Mail, which knows Peter Beattie well, reminded its readers that “Beattie turned Queensland’s public sector into a sheltered workshop for unionists where rorts and sweetheart deals flourished and we’re still feeling the pain”.

That’s the Courier-Mail.

It said, “The size of the public service in Queensland jumped by 40 per cent from June 2000 to June 2012”.
And it said, “By 2012, wages and related costs of maintaining the public service soared to 18.2 billion dollars or 38.9 per cent of the Queensland Government’s total recurrent expenses”.

There was a 164 per cent increase under Beattie in the upper levels of the public service, called AO7.

So a public servant on AO5 was on about 78,000 dollars.

Suddenly he’s gone to AO7, almost 99,000 dollars.

Peter Costello, when he did his audit of Queensland finances, blew the whistle on this and when Campbell Newman swept to power he found a number of “dirty little secrets”, according to the Courier-Mail, that “thanks to the unions, some public servants were paid to do nothing. They did no work for ten years”.

And there’s Kevin Rudd saying that Abbott will cut, cut, cut and that Newman has cut, cut, cut.

How Tony Abbott has the patience to accommodate such hypocrisy and dishonesty is beyond belief.

The interest on Queensland’s debt which will top 81 billion, the interest on the debt will be 11.6 million dollars a day or almost 500,000 dollars an hour.

Kevin Rudd endorsed the man who was the architect of it, Peter Beattie.

Kevin Rudd told us he was putting a broom through New South Wales Labor to clean up cronyism and that’s defined a new party of Kevin Rudd.

One of the architects of the current House of Labor is Sam Dastyari.

He’ll take his seat as a Senator after the Federal election.

He was chosen by Labor, hand-picked, one of the apparatchiks of the Labor Party, a casual vacancy caused by Matt Thistlethwaite’s movement to contest Kingsford-Smith.

Young Sam Dastyari is the former New South Wales State ALP, one of the so-called faceless men who knifed Kevin Rudd only to later knife Julia Gillard.

Kevin Rudd was putting a broom through cronyism.

There weren’t any questions about that in the debate.

But he kept saying he’d cut, cut, cut.

What Mr Rudd didn’t say was that Jane Halton, the secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing, and Andrew Metcalf, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, have seen the writing on the wall.

They’re going to cut, cut, cut.

400 will go from Health and 300 from Agriculture.

The public service realises that the rorts have to stop.

I said yesterday that we need, as former Senator Stephen Loosley said, something like the US Commission on Presidential Debates.

And that Commission frames the debates in such a way that they’re independent, fair and transparent.

We need, as he said, a Prime Ministerial Debating Commission.

We need to establish a framework for three debates, one on domestic policy, primarily the economy, one on foreign policy, defence and national security and then a Town Hall debate, where the Prime Ministerial aspirants face a representative sample of electors combined with a journalistic contingent from beyond Canberra.

All we saw on Wednesday night was Kevin Rudd standing up and telling lies, Tony Abbott took a billion dollars out of the health budget, he never did any such thing.

But Rudd gets away with it, it’s unchallenged.

Tony Abbott has a 70 billion dollar black hole, that’s also been demonstrated to be completely untrue.

But what we weren’t told was the real black hole.

Penny Wong is the Finance Minister.

Her first budget was 2011/12.

She signed off on a predicted deficit of 22.6 billion.

It came out at 43.3 billion.

The same budget in 2011/12 predicted a surplus for 2012/13, these are forward estimates, of 3.5 billion.

We finished up with a deficit of 19.4 billion, an error of 22.9 billion.

The same 2011 budget said this year we’d have a surplus of 3.7 billion.

We heard two weeks ago it will be a deficit of at least 30.1 billion, an error of 33.8 billion.

The same budget of 2011 signed off by the Gillard Government, Penny Wong, Rudd was in the Government, a surplus of 5.8 billion for 2014/15 but last Monday weeks’ figure, 24 billion, an error of 29.8 billion.

A total black hole of 106 billion.

And Kevin Rudd is allowed in a public forum to challenge Tony Abbott on costings and economic competence.

Kevin Rudd makes Gough Whitlam look modest.

Per capita spending under Rudd’s first term was three times that of Whitlam.

Rudd is the costliest Prime Minister in Australian history.

He won’t be asked any questions on that in a debate.

But he was a member of the Government that last year on May 8, 2012 said, “The four years of surplus I announce tonight”.

Elsewhere in the budget speech, “The deficit years of global recession are behind us. The surplus years are here”.

May 12.

The surplus years are here.

We’re now facing a 30 billion dollar deficit if we’re lucky.

The mining tax, Kevin Rudd was the architect.

We have the pub with no beer, it’s the tax with no revenue.

The Coalition promises to get rid of it.

But they’re not getting rid of much.

Why aren’t we told that Tony Abbott was the member of a Government that produced 300 billion dollars worth of surpluses and in the final year, Howard and Costello, they also delivered 34 thousand million dollars in tax cuts.

Labor hasn’t produced a surplus since 1989/90.

On the contrary, the four Labor governments since then, Keating, Rudd, Gillard and Rudd have run up 350 billion dollars in deficits.

30 billion dollars this year.

And they are lecturing us about economic management.

But what does Kevin Rudd say, are you shocked that we can’t police our borders, so am I.

Now I’ll be the toughest cop in town.

Are you against the carbon tax?

So am I.

We’ll abolish it next year.

Are you wondering why we can’t balance the budget?

So am I, so we’ll tax our smokers to kingdom come and pretend we’ll fix it.

Are you tired of the corruption in New South Wales?

So am I, even though I used Eddie Obeid twice to become Prime Minister.

When he announced the election, Kevin Rudd, the two words he never used were “Labor Party”.

Why?

Well, Gillard, Crean, Combet, Smith, Emerson are gone.

There are people now with portfolios that know nothing about them.

Are they asked any questions on that?

No, not in the phoney debate.

But the mantra now is cut, cut, cut.

That’s what Kevin Rudd says.

Well what are we going to cut?

Well, the immigration budget has blown out by 6.6 billion in the last four years.

Abbott will stop that waste.

The broadband could cost, if we keep going as we are, more than 90 billion.

Turnbull will cut that.

69.5 million dollars advertising the carbon tax, they’ll certainly cut that.

A 300 million dollar Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute wasting millions of dollars, they’ll cut that.

The CEO in fact said 100 million dollars in funding was too much for the body to manage efficiently.

“It’s actually impossible to spend that amount of money responsibly.”

Seven million dollars to pay off Labor staff following Kevin Rudd’s assassination.

Well, they’ll cut that money.

4.4 million for the Clean Energy Regulator to spruce up its offices, that won’t happen.

10 million to trade unions to train upcoming leaders, they’ll cut that.

That followed 10 million dollars when Rudd came to power, Tony Abbott will certainly cut that.

20 million on a propaganda campaign for the national broadband network, they’ll cut that.

540 million on a Government literacy and numeracy national partnership programme that produced no improvements in student outcomes.

Staff numbers in the Prime Minister’s office up 30 per cent, an additional one million a year, they’ll cut that.

Half a million dollars to deck out the Environment Department with indoor plants, they’ll certainly cut that.

Public servants purchasing gold-plated coffee machines at a cost of 15,000 dollars each, that will be stopped.

10 million dollars by Government agencies to find out what’s being said about them in the media, that will be stopped.

Press clippings, 940,000 dollars worth for the Department of Health.

526,000 spent by Senator Conroy to select 11 ABC and SBS directors.

They’ll cut that.

72,000 dollars to the Auburn Community Development Network to host an enviro tea salon where participants could take part in a “weaving workshop using native Lomandra grass”.

I think that will go.

What about 600 million dollars of Australia’s foreign aid programme being spent on developing climate change leaders in the Pacific.

Or 145,000 dollars for a study of sleeping snails to determine “factors that aid life extension”.

And Kevin Rudd’s saying cut, cut, cut.

This mob are about spend, spend, spend.

Two million to the Australian Research Council for research projects like “Climate change emotion and ancient economic life in Italy”.

What about a 600,000 dollar bonus to stop senior staff leaving the Labor Government before the election.

Ministerial staffers given a two week termination loading to encourage them to stay.

600,000 dollars, it cost the taxpayer.

158 million dollars for a 15 year lease for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, even though the Coalition says it will axe the department.

8.5 million to advertise a school kids’ bonus but recipients don’t have to do anything to get it.

A 16 million dollar Teach Next scheme to put bankers, accountants and engineers in classrooms to stem the shortage of maths and science teachers.

A promise in the 2010 election, 14 participants.

Cost per recruit, 1.1 million.

6.1 million a month on charter flights moving asylum seekers between overcrowded detention centres.

6.9 million for staff education for NBN Co.

Tony Abbott doesn’t have to cut hospitals or nurses or teachers.

He just has to cut the waste.

But remember, you won’t hear anything about this in a so-called national debate.

Nine billion dollars of your money spent duplicating housing, environmental and community amenities, State functions, nine billion.

Nine billion in direct subsidies to industry.

These are the things you’ll hear nothing about in a so-called debate.

And then of course to cap it all off, because something happens every day, the Prime Minister of Australia was being made up in Brisbane for the so-called Prime Ministerial debate.

And the lady who did the make-up wrote on her Facebook page, “Just finished doing Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott’s make-up for the People’s Forum at the Broncos Leagues Club. One of them was absolutely lovely, engaged in genuine conversation with me, acknowledged that I had a job to do and was very appreciative. The other did the exact opposite.

“Oh boy. I have never had anyone treat me so badly whilst I was trying to do my job. Political opinions aside, from one human being to another, Mr Abbott, you win hands down.”

I too was in a television studio being made up yesterday and that story came up for discussion.

As did the name of Kevin Rudd.

And the make-up lady who was doing me said, “There’s plenty of stories like that. He’s just a pig”.

These are the things you won’t be told about in one of these phoney debates.

Advertisement