The Prime Minister warned that people had "elected the wrong guy" if they believed that once he was in power he would unveil a secret left-wing reform agenda...
Ruud is claiming instead that politics has moved "beyond the classical Left-Right paradigm". Which isn't actually true, but reflects his true style: to pick policies that are popular and implement them like a bureaucrat.
There's no explicit agenda with that, other than power. But the reality is that Rudd's model of practical politics gives more power to the institutions of persuasion, and hence is more likely to reflect their dominant Leftist culture. Take the sorry and Kyoto.
UPDATE
But the agenda of the ministers under Rudd, on the other hand:
CONTROVERSIAL Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, who was refused entry into the US over alleged links to terror networks, is due to deliver a lecture on Islam at a conference sponsored by the Queensland Government on Monday.
Professor Ramadan - whose grandfather Hassan al-Banna founded one of the world's most radical Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1928 - will be introduced by federal Labor Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs Laurie Ferguson at the Griffith University event, which has drawn $50,000 worth of sponsorship from the Bligh Government.
Professor Ian Buruma profiles his old sparring partner, suggesting why Ramadan appeals the Left that Ferguson represents:
The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan's book, is "the northern model of development," which means that "a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive." For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the "abode of war" (alam al-harb), for "when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance."
To be a sworn enemy of capitalism does not mean you are a communist, a fascist, a religious fundamentalist or indeed an anti-Semite, but it is something these otherwise disparate groups frequently have in common. Advocating a revolt against Western materialism on the basis of superior spiritual values is an old project, which has had many fathers but has never been particularly friendly to liberal democracy. Ramadan's brand of Islamic socialism, promoted with such media-friendly vitality, in conferences, interviews, books, talks, sermons and lectures, has won him a variety of new friends, especially in Britain and France.
My own view: It would be wrong do refuse Ramadan permission to come here and speak. Our defence of free speech should be more robust, and we should in any case have more faith in the ability of good ideas to defeat bad ideas - given time. Nor do I think Ramadan such a security menace that these considerations should be set aside in his case. Indeed, we'll do more harm by making a victim of him.
But nor do I think such radicals, preaching values so hostile to those underpinning our freedoms and our material well-being, should be given the privilege and imprimatur of a welcome and introduction from a Minister of the Rudd Government. Or sponsorship via the Bligh Government.
Rudd may not have a Left-wing agenda, but his Government is fostering one nevertheless.
UPDATE 2
Rebecca Weisser notes that others who have studied Ramadan's words think Buruma is far too easy on him:
But Berman, a US author, professor of journalism and writer in residence at New York University, found the Buruma article naive and responded with an article titled "Who's afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" in The New Republic that ran to 28,000 words. Berman distils Ramadan's position on violence as "a double message. The first message condemns terrorism. The second message lavishes praise on the theoreticians of terrorism."…
(S)ome of Ramadan's fiercest critics come from the Left. French author and journalist Caroline Fourest analysed hundreds of Ramadan's recordings, more than a dozen books, and 1500 pages of interviews that had appeared in the press. Fourest says that in his cassettes "one here discovers Ramadan the warlord, giving orders and spelling out his political objectives: to modify the secular state and help matters evolve towards ‘more Islam'. Unfortunately, the Islam in question is not an enlightened and modern Islam but a reactionary and fundamentalist one."
Fourest believes there is no one as effective as Ramadan in furthering fundamentalism in France. "He radicalises the Muslims under his influence by introducing them to the thought of Hassan al-Banna (this constitutes the introduction to his recorded seminars), then he brings them into contact with the present-day ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood: Youssef al-Qaradhawi, one of the few Muslim theologians openly to approve suicide attacks, or Faycal Mawlawi, who is not only a Muslim Brother but also the principal chief of a Lebanese terrorist organisation.