Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018. This is not the worst budget that I have seen in my 21 years here. That prize probably goes to either the 1996 or 2014 budgets. But it is the most political budget I have seen in this place—a budget with one eye, of course, to the next Newspoll. People in my electorate and elsewhere are understandably asking me how Australia is a better place than it was four years ago—that is, since the election of first the Abbott government and, since then, the Turnbull government. They are also asking me, 'What does the Turnbull government stand for? What is its vision?' They ask why the Prime Minister never talks about the things he used to campaign for so energetically: the republic and climate change, for example. Where is the guy, they ask, who would regularly express compassion for asylum seekers? Where is the Malcolm Turnbull who used to campaign for same-sex marriage? I put to the House that they are fair questions. The member for Warringah was not and is not the most popular person in the electorate of Hunter. But people say to me, 'At least we knew what he stood for.'

The member for Warringah is a conservative, and I respect that. I consider myself a progressive, and I know he respects my position. But, having spent all of his adult life espousing progressive views, the Prime Minister no longer ever expresses those views. Of course, the true definition of a conservative is a person who restricts change—does not like change. A progressive, of course, is someone who believes that change should be a constant; that we can always do better tomorrow than we did yesterday or today. The history of human beings has been one of positive progressive advance in the main. Not all progress has been good but, in the main, it has been positive progressive advance. Tony Abbott and those like him are conservatives—

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