Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to remind people listening and those in the chamber that on this day in 2008 Malcolm Turnbull defeated Brendan Nelson for the Liberal leadership. At his first press conference of his one year and 76 days at the helm Mr Turnbull said:

… our job as Liberals is to ensure that our society is a fair one.

Words come cheap to those on the other side. He did not believe it then and he does not believe it now. Mr Turnbull now takes over the reins of a party that has shown it is anything but fair and does anything but act in the interests of a fair society. If you think we are going to get a different government and that anything will change under Mr Turnbull's stewardship then you must also inhabit the same blissful la-la land that Mr Turnbull refers to so often.

Elocution lessons and a nice suit will not be enough to change the unfair agenda of the Abbott-Turnbull government. It is determined to inflict pain on the Australian people and create incredible unfairness and inequity. We see that at every turn, whether it is their budget choices or the legislation and regulations they push through this parliament. Without Labor holding it up it would be a lot worse than it already is.

The new Prime Minister was one of the heavy lifters in cabinet who supported all the cuts—every single one of them—of the horror budget of 2014. That was the budget that ripped $80 billion out of hospitals and schools, the budget that cut pensions and slashed funding to the ABC and SBS, the budget that intended to take away unemployment benefits from young job seekers and the budget that proposed a GP tax to visit a doctor. He supported it all—emphatically and on many occasions.

While the conservative state Premiers were so horrified by the budget measures that they took a stand against Mr Abbott, Mr Turnbull was out trumpeting the values of that very budget. Even with the benefit of hindsight—having seen the Australian public's reaction to it and having watched it held up here in the Senate—just in March this year Mr Turnbull said in a speech at the Brisbane Club that it was 'in no way correct to say that the 2014-15 budget was a failure'. By deduction he clearly thinks it was a success. He said the problem was not the cuts themselves but the way the government sold them. Labor has managed to stop many of the Liberal's cruel legislation efforts from hurting Australian families but we know this government is still determined to slug students with a $100,000 debt for a university degree and is still determined to break and dismantle Medicare and fair access to health care for all Australians.

Is Mr Turnbull ever going to stop the deregulation of tertiary education? Not if we believe his words. If he changes his mind, that will reveal his character more—that you cannot trust a single word he says. Is he going to stop the GP tax by stealth the Liberals have imposed by freezing the Medicare rebate? Not if we believe his words. If he does change his mind, once again he will prove how ill suited, in terms of his character, he is for the high office of the Prime Minister of this great country.

The Liberal government that Mr Turnbull now leads is still hell-bent on taking away penalty rates from hardworking and unselfish workers, such as nurses, who work unsocial hours and holidays such as Christmas. That is what he wants to get rid of. People experience inconvenience working at those times yet this government, with Malcolm Turnbull as part of the cabinet and now as its Prime Minister, are all for taking away any compensation for the dedication of caring, hardworking Australians.

Last week the Fair Work Taskforce held its first hearing in New South Wales at Gosford in the seat of Robertson. We know the member for Robertson is one of the ones who backed Mr Abbott 100 per cent last week. This week, with blood on her hands, with the knife at her disposal—