Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

They could, indeed, well do with a code of silence—and I have a good suspicion of who the Prime Minister would be putting under the code of silence, given the 7.30 report tonight. I am sure we will be watching that with great interest.

What we have seen is exactly that scenario rolled out time and time again by this Prime Minister in the last 12 months: 'We are going to massively restructure the GST. This will be a great answer to resolving the economic challenges of the country.' A few—and I would have to say they were not really on the other side; they were mostly on his side—just looked at him and went, 'Nah, I do not think so.'

It did not take long. 'Well, instead of that, we will have a proposal for the states and territories to raise their own income levy; would you believe that?' and along with most of the country they sort of looked at him and went, 'Nah, not so much'—and that disappeared. We ended up with a fairly pathetic claim that the budget itself was going to be an economic strategy, and it would be so exciting and innovative that they would take it to the election.

One could forgive us, then, for having reasonably high expectations of the budget—that there was actually going to be a detailed plan for investing in the infrastructure and people of this nation to create new job opportunities, boost existing industries, lay the foundation for new industries that would be competitive into the future in areas, for example, like renewable energy, where we could be a world leader and, in fact, once were. But, no; the keystone, single, only way that they were going to deliver an economic plan for this nation was a massive tax cut for the big end of town. What a disappointment! I have to be honest: I do not even think Maxwell Smart would have tried to run that one by anybody!

An opposition member: Missed it by that much!

As the member quite rightly says: missed it by that much—another of the great statements of the show. So we now see a situation where even that is falling apart. Even those on the crossbenches in this place are looking at that, saying, 'Yeah, nah—I do not think so.'

So we do not even have a plan from this government to do what it needs to be doing—investing in this nation, creating real opportunities and laying out an economic plan that is much more than a failed trickle-down economic theory that, to be honest, has been discredited probably for much longer than most of them have been walking this earth.

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