Unless some people have someone shouting at them they're incapable of picking up the message.

As a carer and as a parent of school children I can report Rudd has more than delivered. In fact he has delivered in all areas EXCEPT where he has been stopped by a conservative Senate: e.g. Fuelwatch: BLOCKED, Grocerywatch: BLOCKED, CPRS: BLOCKED, Private Health Rebate Reform: BLOCKED, and on and on.

And he has done this while keeping Australia free of most of the Global Financial Crisis downside. We are the envy of the world. Is that just spin?

So Bruce have a look and a listen. Unless of course you are ideologically brainwashed like most of the posts and posters above.

LRAM,

You don't work for a political staffer by any chance, do you?

Like, what else could possess you to be so sure?

RobP is right about the 7:30 Report - a masterclass in avoidance of the question. Full transcript at http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2830544.htm , but below is the section where O'Brien 8 times tried to get Rudd to say what had gone wrong. I've cut out the waffle and reduced each of Rudd's statements as close to substance as he ever gets. O'Brien must have felt like he was trying to herd cats.

[begin]

KO’B: Where exactly did the Department [of Environment] go wrong, in your view?
KR: Minister Garrett established standards for the industry, on training, on OH&S, and on quality.
KO’B: Now, I'm going to have to stop you there because...
KR: They are the standards.
KO’B: Yes, we’ve heard that. What went wrong?
KR: The shonks were not picked up by the compliance mechanisms.
KO’B: So...
KR: That's the problem.
KO’B: What went wrong that the department's compliance mechanisms did not work?
KR: There’s evidence of the system not having worked as it needed to.
KO’B: Yes.
KR: As I've said before.
KO’B: But what went wrong, where did it go wrong?
KR: Compliance means that you have a compliance system within it which provides quality control and assessment ...
KO’B: Yes, I understand what compliance is, I'm saying what went wrong with the compliance system? How did it fail?
KR: Well, it failed because it didn't pick up a pattern of badly done installation. That is what went wrong. The Minister had established a series of risk management strategies ...
KO’B: Okay, but it failed.
KR: This has produced real problems. We will fix it.
KO’B: What I'm getting to, really, is: Who will take responsibility? Who will take real responsibility for this failure?
KR: The compliance systems have not worked and the Department of the Environment is responsible.
KO’B: So is your Department incompetent?
KR: Let me just answer the other part of your question and your premise, which I dispute ...

[end]

And on and on it went. Which interviewer wouldn't get tired and eventually give up?

No, I don't RobP.

Didn't think you or any of your type could answer the points I made.

Following up on my previous post:

Reading it like that, in my radically shortened version, it looks and sounds ludicrous – as it should. But if you check out the original full text, you find that most of Rudd’s so-called “answers” were swimming in a miasma of superfluous verbiage, which served to disguise the vapidity of the waffle.

Watching the interview live, by the time you’ve danced around three or four of Rudd’s verbal gavottes, your head is swimming and you feel like you’re wading through treacle.

As a result you miss the kernel of his non-argument, hidden away in the middle. Here it comes in its original form: “Well, it failed because it didn't pick up a pattern of, shall I say, wrong installation, or badly done installation, by a certain number of firms. That is what went wrong.”

Incorrect, Kevin. It didn’t fail BECAUSE it didn’t pick up a pattern. It failed, and AS A RESULT didn’t pick up a pattern. The CAUSE of its failure, and the nature of that failure, and the people responsible for that failure, are still unknown to us. Rudd has disingenuously confused cause and effect.

And, just as he did when he disingenuously conflated people smugglers and the much more sinister people traffickers, as if this notorious micromanager didn’t know the critical difference, he has befuddled even the most experienced and persistent members of the press gallery into letting him get away with it.

Finding the nub of Kevin Rudd’s deflectionary rhetoric is like trying to find a tiny white hair in a tub of fairy floss. He does it all the time, and the ONLY way to find it is to go to the transcript – which, for a live interviewer, is hours too late. By the time you expose the trick, the trickster is long gone.

Sigh. And we thought John Howard was a waffler.

Slobodon,

Are you sure that's not John Clarke and Bryan Dawe?

Maybe Yes Minister?