Will the real Kevin Rudd please stand up?

This was just before Rudd became Labor Leader - before the pollsters and the image consultants told him his chances of election would increase if he ditched the socialist stuff and became an economic conservative.

But the re-badging driven by the pollsters and advertising people is designed to mislead, not inform, the public about who Kevin Rudd really is. Mr Rudd is not an economic conservative.

In a speech to the Sydney Institute in 2000 Mr Rudd said it was the duty of social democrats like himself to develop a “New Internationalism”. He outlined a ten-point agenda for this New Internationalism, full of Euro-left sentiment including a lament that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had become a “toothless tiger”.

Mr Rudd said that there should be a “red-thread” running through all policies, including economic management. An economic conservative is unlikely to want a “red thread” running through their economic policies.

Mr Rudd has stated that “free markets must also be managed markets”, a very odd position for an economic conservative. And when it comes to tax, Mr Rudd has continued his “red thread” theme by speaking of his intense frustration that taxes are not higher.

In his article “Inserting a New Dialectic” in the Evatt Foundation book Globalisation: Australian Impacts (note his use of the old Marxist term, dialectic), Mr Rudd lists five priorities for social democrats in dealing with globalisation.

He lists his very first priority: to “redress” the global situation where “higher taxing regimes are punished, and the reverse are rewarded”.

Kevin, economic conservatives are not concerned that “higher taxing regimes are punished, and the reverse are rewarded”, for they understand that this is a competitive world and that keeping tax low is part of keeping a country competitive and business strong. And economic conservatives are not attempting to “redress” that situation because they are not pumping for higher taxes.

Only someone who wanted to raise taxes would be worried about it. The interesting thing about this latest Labor move for an extreme makeover for Kevin Rudd is that it reveals an obsession with badging to cover up substance.

Kevin Rudd is being managed and packaged by PR consultants and pollsters. He says what the pollsters tell him. They tell him to say what the electorate wants to hear - not what he actually believes.

Labor wants economic respectability but rather than do the economic hard work they always look for a gimmick. They appointed Sir Rod Eddington as their Chief Business Adviser to give the impression that they are working with business. All they wanted was a blue-chip badge to cover up a dodgy product.

The latest TV ads are another example of Labor badging to cover up a dud product. Labor thinks that TV ads will prove more successful in portraying Kevin Rudd as economically conservative than hard policy. But the public is entitled to look behind the slick advertising.

Let me finish with one question for the supposed economic conservative Kevin Rudd.

Last year the Reserve Bank Governor Ian Macfarlane commented on the impact of industrial relations on interest rates. He said: “Obviously, it makes the job of monetary policy easier, the more deregulated the labour market is.”

This is an observation that genuine economic conservatives would agree with without qualification or delay. The test for Mr Rudd is, does he?