If you read this blog, you’ve known since November last year what Peter Costello told Parliament yesterday: that Kevin Rudd’s ‘Brutopia’ comes not from the late British conservative intellectual Michael Oakeshott, but from Donald Duck comics. In the Treasurer’s words:
When you ask where he [Rudd] draws his inspiration for his quack economic policy, you find that it comes from a Donald Duck magazine. …This is the evolutionary cycle of the Labor Party. We have moved from Mark Latham’s roosters to Kevin Rudd’s ducks.
The SMH took it one better, labelling Rudd’s views ‘quackonomics’ (in a play on Freakonomics), but they are still buying the Oakeshott line:
Labor’s spin doctors argued that the tactics showed the Government had failed to find any point of substance against Mr Rudd. Yet you can be sure this year he will resist the temptation to intellectualise his subject matter with clever terminology even if it was actually borrowed from British conservative Michael Oakeshott, rather than Donald Duck.
I’ll email the journalist today and ask him to get Labor to provide the exact source of this claimed Oakeshottian term.
Andrew Norton 
All this really proves is that (a) Rudd reads more widely than anybody thought (Hayek, Donald Duck comics, possibly even Quadrant you never know) and (b) Costello is a glass-jawed pedant who hasn’t landed a glove on an oponent in 11 years.
If that’s the best attack the liberal party can come up with, they are doomed.
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David, It’s just a bit of fun at the expense of someone painting himself as a deep thinker on the basis of cribbed notes (mostly David McKnight, from what others say). It’s the least of the reasons not to vote for Rudd, but a good way to make question time more fun.
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…and it has been fun so far, although mostly feinting and dancing with no real blows landed by either side. It’s easy to forget that the coalition struggled to handle Latham in the early days too, but managed to expose his self destructive tendencies in the end.
I don’t think that will work with Rudd (not that I’m warming much to him). I suspect that, if the past is any measure, the simple fact that I have a healthy disregard for Rudd’s onservative persona means that the rest of Australia will eat him up like a paddle pop on Australia day.
The real wildcard is that the “steady hands” mantra is looking shaky with a hubris ridden prime minister who is ignoring his own advice on avoiding it.
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Andrew:
I’m not sure if I agree with your concept of fun if you find a parliament question time wasted with over-energetic, not to mention embarrassing, question jumping. It serves well to piss me off, in fact.
But your ideas are thoughtful enough. Windschuttle, as I’m sure you know, has weighed in on the debate. And so has my blog, strinelife.blogspot.com
To your likely surprise, I can mostly agree with one and mostly disagree with the other.
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Edward – Given the dreary propaganda that occupies most of question time Costello’s humour is welcome light relief.
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There is a small Oakeshott revival under way with an academic cottage industry applied to his works and a website established by admirers. Social engineers, coercive utopians and people in favour of heavily regulated markets will get no joy from his thoughts.
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