Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will happily rise and talk about legislation that effectively moves to allow the increase in the salaries of ministers and to make further increases subject to regulation, because how can a government propose legislation like this with a record of 2½ years not of incompetence, not of impotence but of shameful and hideous waste? How can any minister in this government support this legislation when they have a record of having watched billions of taxpayers dollars burnt away to nothing, with nothing to show for it except smouldering ruins in their own portfolios? I am looking for one government minister to come in here and justify that pay rise under a Prime Minister who in his first year in power froze all parliamentary salaries in seeking out a headline for a day. He froze those salaries and then, when we were in the midst of an economic recovery, when we most needed to stimulate the economy, he allowed the salaries to rise again. That is what I call countercyclical economic policy, if ever I have seen it. This is a Prime Minister who says one thing and then does something completely different. This is a Prime Minister who has presided over spin and inputs rather than wins and outcomes.

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