Mr Keating excoriated Mr Rudd’s ”goodie two shoes” approach and said there were surely better candidates. ”Kevin Rudd must have no respect for the Future Fund in appointing Peter Costello to it.

”The Future Fund is all about national savings, yet during Costello’s period as treasurer, national savings were so depleted … Costello was the debt-builder extraordinaire.

”When Peter Costello had the debt truck running around in 1996 it had $129 billion painted on its side. Had the truck kept pace with Costello’s profligacy it would have had $705 billion on its fiscal odometer.

”Costello was a policy bum of the first order who squandered 11 years of economic opportunity … His sole claim to a structural measure was the GST and that was introduced by [John] Howard over the top of him.”

Whatever you think of PJK’s other opinionating, it’s very hard not to agree with him on this. The cynic in me suspects that Kevin Rudd might be hoping one day for some sort of post-Prime Ministerial role on the world stage, and thus doing a bit of pre-emptive insulation from criticism. His “Australia of all the talents” thing certainly works as a political tactic – enabling him to appear bipartisan and above politics while being anything but – but I’d have thought some of his appointments could be described as mediocre, to put it charitably.