Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Regrettably, I must rise today and disagree with some of my colleagues. They say there is no difference between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, but I think that is completely untrue because we, as a nation, have made a great leap forward. We have moved from the three-word slogans to the five-word slogan. 'Axe the tax' is no more. Instead we have, 'Vote Labor and be poorer'. That is a real difference; we have added verbosity. Of course, our Prime Minister does not quite have his predecessor's knack for the sound bite, but he does have the same capacity for vacuous repetition. And remember, this is the man who, in his pitch for the prime ministership, told us, 'We need advocacy, not slogans'—which, oxymoronically, has itself become just another slogan.

The Prime Minister has been unable to produce one shred of credible evidence to support his five-word slogan. This morning his Treasurer was desperately trying to tout a BIS Shrapnel report, even though the author of the report said it was not based on Labor's policy. It was such a credible report that it actually cited Australia's annual income as— (Time expired)