Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

It is a very long time indeed since a new government has been such a disappointment. Not for a generation has a new government come to power and so quickly and so utterly disillusioned the people who supported it. We do not change the government lightly in this country; for the people’s mandate to be withdrawn from one party and handed to another is a big thing. But this government, in a remarkable way, has entirely squandered the trust that the people reposed in it almost three years ago. Where now the glorious February 2008! What happened to that great dawn when bliss it was to be alive and a Labor member of parliament!

We had the ratification of Kyoto, that great moment that signalled the dawn of a new era! Now we have the dumping of the emissions trading scheme and the abandonment of that which was supposed to solve not just the problem but the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. Then we had the apology, an overdue and noble gesture reaching out to the first Australians. Now we have a government which is conniving to rip away Indigenous land rights on Cape York, despite the passage last night in the Senate of the private member’s bill to override the wild rivers legislation of Queensland.

16:14:28 I accept that it is not easy for new governments. New governments have inexperienced ministers trying to meet impossible expectations. I accept that the Howard government struggled in its first term, and was only just returned. In 1984 Prime Minister Hawke had an approval rating of 70 per cent and yet his government came close to losing that year’s election, perhaps because of complacency. But both of those governments had solid records of achievement. Those governments were both in their own way historic. Neither government put the preservation of a superficial popularity ahead of substantial achievement for the Australian people. In its first term, the Hawke government achieved historic reforms. It deregulated the financial market. It floated the Australian dollar. The Howard government, in its first term, achieved historic gun law reform. It built on former Prime Minister Keating’s industrial legislation. It reformed the waterfront and, most importantly, it began the task of fiscal reform on which the current economic strength of this country is founded.

What has this government achieved? We all know that it was a very subdued and very unhappy caucus meeting yesterday. We all know that the Prime Minister attempted to rally his troops by telling them to go out and sell the government’s achievements. What are those government achievements? First, there is a paid parental leave scheme that is a small step in the right direction but which is basically a rebadged baby bonus, and we have a National Broadband Network, better described as a nationalised broadband network, which will hardly be noticed by the Australian people for many years and which will add billions and billions of dollars to Australia’s unsustainable debt. Oh, yes—the other achievement was avoiding a recession. The avoidance of the recession, let us make it absolutely crystal clear, owes far more to the reforms of the previous government than it does to the spending spree of the current one.

So that is it. After three years, this government has turned a $20 billion surplus into a $57 billion deficit, it has turned a $60 billion net asset position into a $100 billion net debt position, and all it has to show for it is a rebadged baby bonus, an economic slowdown, ameliorated by other people’s work, and a National Broadband Network that will not be delivered for decades. This is a government which has failed. This is a government which promised not to means test the baby bonus, but has. It promised not to means test the private health insurance rebate, but it has tried to do just that. It promised us GroceryWatch—undelivered. It promised us Fuelwatch—undelivered. Doesn’t the Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law squirm at the table when he is reminded of his own personal failures? The government promised us 35 GP superclinics and has delivered three. It promised us 260 childcare centres and, having delivered some 20, has said 240 are no longer necessary. Of course with the greatest moral challenge of our time—not just any old problem but the greatest moral, economic, political and social challenge of our time, climate change—there is no policy. There is no policy whatsoever to deal with climate change.

Prior to the election the Prime Minister claimed he was the economic conservative, and he has become the greatest public wastrel in Australian political history. This is the economic conservative in opposition who has spent his time as Prime Minister attacking market fundamentalism, attacking 30 years of neoliberalism, and in fact rejecting the serious and beneficial reforms of more courageous and more substantial Labor predecessors. Broken promises are bad, but breaking promises is not all he has done. He has wasted taxpayers’ money in a way that is absolutely unforgivable. Now he wants to destroy our economic future with a great big new tax on mining, and that is tantamount to a political crime. A Prime Minister who has so misjudged a decision of this magnitude, a Prime Minister who has so mishandled due process in coming to a decision of this magnitude, is a Prime Minister who is no longer fit to govern this country.

Only a government with no shame would have kept its pink batts program going despite more than 20 official and formal warnings from government officials, from state governments and from professional bodies. The government went on, despite these warnings, to install 240,000 dodgy or dangerous insulations which, in their turn, caused more than 150 house fires, potentially electrified perhaps thousands of Australian roofs and, shame on shame, have been linked to four deaths. This is a Labor government—a Labor government indifferent to warnings that, had they been heeded, could have avoided the deaths of four workers.

Only a government with no sense of value for money would have wasted billions and billions on overpriced school halls. Anyone familiar with construction in this country could have gone to the Rawlinsons guide or the other standard industry guides and found out that the construction of a single-storey school building should have averaged $1,500 a square metre. But, no, that is not what this government has achieved. It gave money to independent schools, and of course independent schools managed to get the work done for $2,400 a square metre. But what did this government do with the vast bulk of the money? It gave it to the state education departments. In New South Wales, they have managed to achieve school hall construction at a price fully three times the industry average—$4,500 a square metre—but in some instances, particularly with the cubby-house size canteens in country schools, the cost has been $25,000 a square metre.

A government which cannot be trusted with public money is a government which cannot be trusted with re-election. Now, with $5.5 billion yet to spend, the government has appointed a value-for-money inquiry whose chairman has not even read the Auditor-General’s report and is proposing to spend the rest of the money before even getting that report, which will cost $14 million to produce. It is just not good enough, and now the government is targeting the most productive industry in our country with a penalty tax almost guaranteed to kill the mining boom stone dead.

Any government that thinks success should attract penalty rates of taxation and that regards a rate of return better than you can achieve by putting your money into the bank as being a super profit which should attract a super tax is a government which has no experience of how the real world works. But what should we expect from a Prime Minister who is a lifelong public sector employee, a Deputy Prime Minister who has rarely stepped outside the cabals of politics, except as a union lawyer, a Treasurer who is a lifelong party official and a finance minister who was a lifelong union official? I do not say that those are not worthy occupations in their own ways, but shouldn’t there be someone—just someone—in the decision-making counsels of this government who has some understanding of the economy on which every Australian’s prosperity depends?

Only a government with no understanding of how our economy works would think that the $53 billion of taxpayers’ money that we will be paying off for years should have been used to avoid two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Only a government with no understanding of how the real world works would think it makes sense to spend $43 billion recreating the Telecom of the 1960s without even a business plan. Only a government which is utterly bereft of any conception of due process would have told us that we were going to have root-and-branch tax reform and then not released the Henry review for months and then took just one of its 138 recommendations and distorted it, lied about it and told us that the government had achieved tax reform.

Let us be very clear about the great big new tax on mining. It is not what Ken Henry recommended. It is not going to pay for increases in superannuation. It is going to fund a lot more government spending as well as a hardly-to-be-noticed reduction in company tax. Nor is the great big new tax on mining going to build the infrastructure that Australia needs. All it is going to do is fund the continued spending spree of a government which is addicted to spending and, because it is addicted to spending, to taxation too. It is not good enough, and the Australian people deserve better.

The tragedy is that if this government is re-elected we will get more of the same, only worse. We will have a government which is all about politics and has no deep and abiding principles. We will have a government which puts its own political survival ahead of fundamental and necessary reform. We will have a government in the mood for vengeance on its critics. The Prime Minister said the other night to the mining industry, ‘We have a long memory.’ And that is exactly right. We know what the Prime Minister is threatening. We know the threats the Prime Minister is making behind closed doors to members of the mining industry, and that spirit of vengefulness seeped out last week in the Great Hall when he threatened people that he had a long memory.

We need to change the government because the alternative is different and better. I say to the Australian public: if you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government; if you want to stop the tax, you have to change the government; if you want to restore cabinet due process, you have to change the government. More and more people want to change the government because they do not want to see this government do any more damage. There is talk of risk from members opposite; the risk is that the Australian people might give this government the second chance that it certainly does not deserve.

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