FORMER Labor finance minister Peter Walsh has savaged the Prime Minister as an "economic illiterate" in the wake of the government's decision to reject the Productivity Commission recommendations that would have slashed book prices.
Mr Walsh, who remade the national economy in the 1980s with Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, is regarded as a tough and uncompromising economic reformer but one who never forgot Labor's working-class roots.
He slammed Kevin Rudd's reform credentials and style of governing. "The Prime Minister is an economic illiterate," he told The Australian, "an economic illiterate and an egomaniac".
"He won't take any hard decisions. He's capricious. He sees himself as some sort of Platonic philosopher king."
