Via Domainfax today:
“Not only had Swan been treacherous, he’d also been a coward. He didn’t even the have the guts to come and front me and tell me face to face what he had decided to do.”
Mr Rudd said Mr Swan lacked the “cerebral horsepower” of the finance minister Lindsay Tanner and was missing in action during Labor’s battle against the resources industry over the mining tax.
“It was an all-round appalling performance,” Mr Rudd recalls.
Mr Rudd said weak treasurers could improve with careful tuition but that did not apply to Mr Swan because “that assumed there was a basic level of intellectual software capable of being trained, as well as a treasurer sufficiently interested in being trained.”
“In Swan’s case, neither condition existed,” Mr Rudd observed.
Mr Rudd claimed when Euromoney named the Labor treasurer as the world’s best finance minister in 2011, “there was an almost audible dropping of jaw around the departments of Treasury, Finance and Prime Minister and Cabinet”.
Of course, Mr Swan remained Treasurer and was one of the three ministers that signed away Australia’s tax code to the major miners in the Cabinet Room.
One might debate whether this or Mr Swan’s GFC bank bailout was the seminal moment in the destruction of the Australian liberal market economy that led us to today’s rentier swamp but he certainly played a central role in both.