Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to make a contribution to the matter of public importance: the Abbott government's second anniversary of broken promises, slogans, dysfunction and division. Before the last federal election in 2013, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to be known as the Prime Minister who keeps commitments. Here we are today and the reality of the coalition's two years in government could not be more stark. That commitment by the Prime Minister is in tatters. From the very start of this federal government, they started to break promises. They broke the promise that they made to Australian pensioners, they broke the promise that they made to Australian families and they broke the promise that they made to the institutions of the ABC and SBS. They went about breaking nearly every promise that they made to Australians.

Just after the federal election in 2013, I went to a forum that was being presented by Ms Macklin. One of the participants at that forum said, 'I voted for Mr Abbott because he said that he would not cut pensions, and I'm here today because that promise has been broken and I am fearful of what will happen to me.' That is what that Tasmanian said—a Tasmanian who lives in Mr Nikolic's electorate of Bass, who is a member of parliament that did not stand up to the Prime Minister and say, 'Hang on, you said there would be no cuts to pensions. You said that you would not cut pensions, and here we are trying to take money from pensioners who really already struggle to make ends meet.' That is the government that we have here today.

The government is so driven by out-of-date ideology and controlled by vested interests that it has come to stand for nothing but cuts and broken promises. This is a government so focused on itself that it is devoid of any real vision for the nation. The division that now grips Mr Abbott's cabinet and the caucus room has left this government paralysed. It has no legislative agenda and no policy for the future; just a growing list of leadership contenders and, I might add, a growing list of cabinet leakers. Perhaps I should say that there is also a growing dinner card for Mr Murdoch.

Let's see what this government has achieved. We see for the first time in over 20 years more than 800,000 Australians out of work, with unemployment increasing from 5.7 per cent to 6.3 per cent now. You will not hear that in the contributions from those opposite. They do not talk about the 800,000 Australians out of work, they do not talk about the unemployment rate now and they do not talk about the youth unemployment rate. Tasmanian senators in this chamber know that the youth unemployment rate in some parts of Tasmania is over 20 per cent. Shame on those opposite.

They also do not talk about economic growth, which has been below trend in every quarter under this government. You will not hear them talking about that in their contributions here today. Of course, they do not talk about the living pressures on ordinary Australian families. They do not talk about the fact that they want to take away from those families over $6,000— (Time expired)