Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

This is the time of year when everybody is tired. I would have to say the Minister for Health and Ageing must be particularly so, given that contribution. Everybody is tired and everybody is looking forward to a Christmas break. That would be a feeling across the nation, but the malaise that is infecting the Howard government is more than just end-of-year tiredness. It is a far deeper malaise than that.

Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, as you see this government in this chamber, there is one impression that is overwhelming. Even this government’s best friends would say that its best days are behind it. I do not think anyone in this country would suggest that the best days of the Howard government are yet to come. Its best days are behind it. It is an ageing government, a stale government and a government that is now full of excuses but completely lacking the reforming drive and zeal—the new ideas, the new energy, the new style of leadership—required to make this country a better and fairer place.

It shows when a government gets this tired and stale. It shows in the way it handles issues, in the way it deals with problems and in what it is prepared to claim as successes. Let us just run through a list, even from today in question time, of the excuses this government has used for its poor performance. It was confronted with a major water crisis and its inability to get one more drop of water into the Murray river, despite the Prime Minister in February this year saying he was going to put a bomb under the process. When that is a fact confronting it, this government says, ‘We’ve let a tender,’ as if between February 2006 and December 2006, when you have ‘put a bomb’ under the process, letting a tender is good enough. Well, I would hate to see them on a slow day if that is their current definition of good performance.

Then we have got to the stage with this government where they come into this House and say: ‘Incompetence is okay. Unless we have actually done something corrupt, it does not matter. Incompetence is okay.’ Incompetence is the new standard of achievement for the Howard government. So at the end of this year, which has been so much about the wheat for weapons scandal, they proudly backslap each other because they are going to get away with gross incompetence, because incompetence is the new standard of achievement when you are as tired and as stale as they are.

And then another excuse has come into this government’s rhetoric. The excuse is: ‘We aren’t the worst.’ We saw the Prime Minister scrabbling around in question time today for references to Labor immigration policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s to justify the fact that in 2005 and 2006 his government has been detaining Australian citizens, including children, and has been seeking on at least one occasion to deport an Australian citizen. And this government’s excuse to that is, ‘Well, you know, maybe at some time in the dim and distant past something happened like that.’ As a matter of fact that is not true; nothing like that happened. But imagine a government that is supposed to be in control of the country saying, ‘Well, if we can ever look back across Australia’s history and find another time someone made a mistake, that excuses us today.’ That is the degree of malaise that is infecting the Howard government.

More than anything, we see it as they play the blame game. Nothing is ever their fault. This Prime Minister has made an art form of associating himself with success in this country. Indeed earlier, in my home town of Melbourne during the Commonwealth Games this year, the rumour through all the venues was: if you did not see the Prime Minister in the stands, we clearly were not going to win a gold medal. It was absolutely impossible at the Commonwealth Games for an Australian athlete to win a gold medal unless the Prime Minister was on hand to present it, associating himself with success. We see him jumping in his tracksuit watching his TV when we succeed on the sporting field in the soccer. And, if one is to believe the rhetoric, he is apparently the captain of our cricket team! That does not seem to be the case when I watch the cricket on TV, but I am obviously missing something. The Prime Minister is clearly the captain of our cricket team.

See this speech in context