KEVIN Rudd will stand against Julia Gillard for the leadership on Monday and hopes to be victorious by smashing the Prime Minister's credibility.
Mr Rudd said he would renew trust in the Government and accused Ms Gillard of framing him to avoid responsibility for her problems.
The former Foreign Minister, and former Prime Minister, said if he lost he would not challenge Ms Gillard a second time from the back bench.
But he said, "If I didn't exist, people would be casting around for an alternative leader of the Labor Party."
Mr Rudd said today he wanted to finish the job Australians had elected him to do in 2007 and made direct appeals to the electorate as well as to the Labor Caucus members who will decide his future.
A touch of anger and aggression emerged towards the end of his Brisbane press conference when he said he had been framed for all the Gillard Government's problems and took aim at the Prime Minister.
"It wasn't K Rudd who made a pre-election commitment on a carbon tax. It wasn't K Rudd who made a particular commitment to (independent Andrew Wilkie) on the question of poker machines," he said.
"It wasn't K Rudd who had anything to do with the East Timor solution or the Malaysian solution (to asylum seeker arrivals).
These were initiatives and decisions taken uniquely by the Prime Minister.
"And I'm a bit tired and fed up by this general frame which says that if the Government has a problem and Prime Minister Gillard's leadership has a problem, ipso facto it's because of me. It is simply unsustainable."
Mr Rudd joined the rush of previously confidential stories from the cabinet room, most of which have been against him, by confirming Ms Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan had opposed proceeding with his Emissions Trading Scheme.
"Yes, but I take full responsibility for the decision," he said.
"They took a view, very bluntly and very directly, that we should not proceed with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. And furthermore, in the case of Julia, that we should instead adopt what she called a bipartisan solution."
He said Ms Gillard, then his deputy, had wanted to wait until Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had returned to the Coalition to the position held by Malcolm Turnbull of backing a price on carbon.
"That's the unvarnished record of what occurred," said Mr Rudd.
He also attacked Opposition Tony Abbott as he argued he was the Labor leader most able to defeat him at an election.
"Mr Abbott is a man who has proved he has neither the temperament nor the vision nor the experience to hold the high office of Prime Minister of Australia," he told reporters.
"He is a man with both feet firmly planted in the past.
"His view of the National Broadband Network is from the 1990s, and by his own admission he believes the NBN is just a new way of sending emails and downloading movies more quickly.
"That's what Mr Abbott not only thinks; that's what he said.
"His view on climate change is not from the 1990s, it's from the 1960s where he simply denies that climate change is a problem. In fact he says, to quote his immortal phrase, absolute crap.
"And then there's his attitude to women, which doesn't go back to the 1960s,; it goes back to the 1950s."
Mr Rudd offered Caucus greater power and said he would hand back the right to pick the ministry which he had taken for himself in 2007.
That could mean he might have to work with some of his most severe and public critics of the past few days, such as Simon Crean and Nicola Roxon. He would retain the right to allocate port folios.
He had taken the selection power from Caucus to weaken the power of the factions, but now appears ready to placate those factions.
http://www.news.com.au/national-old/rud ... 6280784182
