Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Much has been published recently about the apparent psychoses that are lurking deep within the recesses of the Prime Minister’s mind. Indeed, it has become a national pastime to analyse the disturbingly complex and erratic behaviour of this Prime Minister: his temper tantrums over trivial inconveniences; his propensity to profanity in the most inappropriate circumstances, clearly designed to offend all in earshot; his deep-seated anger; and his thirst for revenge on those who might disagree with him. But it is his compulsion to make grandiose announcements that he has no intention of fulfilling that really hurts the Australian people. Sure, it hurts his credibility, but this Prime Minister is damaging our economy and hurting Australian families.

The celebrated psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said—and, indeed, he could have had this Prime Minister in mind—that ‘the man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing’. Rarely, if ever, has anyone assumed the high office of Prime Minister with the high expectations of this Prime Minister—expectations built on his flimsy platform of grand rhetoric. The Prime Minister was everywhere as Leader of the Opposition before the election, promising to intervene in every aspect of society. He was promising to fix every social ill. In every aspect of the lives of Australian families, the Prime Minister would be there intervening. There was nothing that the government could not fix, nothing that would not have the Prime Minister’s magic wand of intervention waved over it and be fixed. We would have an education revolution with laptops for all. He would fix the public hospitals. He would decrease the waiting lists. Labor hailed this new Messiah who was going to take us to the Promised Land of milk and honey, where there would be lower petrol prices and lower grocery prices and all the state premiers would sit around with the Prime Minister singing Kumbayain Mandarin.

This nirvana has not come to be, but the Prime Minister went on. Not content with promising the undeliverable, he declared war. He declared war on binge drinking, he declared war on poker machines, he declared war on unemployment, he declared war on drugs—on doping in sport—and he declared war on inflation and on executive salaries. This was a man out of control. But the ultimate would have to be his statement that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our age. He asked, he begged, he pleaded the Australian people to believe him. He truly believed that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our age.

The Australian people are reasonable. They give a new government a fair go. That is borne out by history—there has only been one government voted out after one term. The honeymoon given to the Rudd government has been exceedingly generous. The trust the voters had in the Prime Minister to fulfil the promises he made was evidenced by his rise in the polls. But it is now clear that an increasing number of Australian people have come to the realisation that they were duped in 2007 by slick Labor marketing machines, backed by union scare campaigns, and a politician who sought to seduce the Australian people with his shiny new promises. The seducer has now betrayed the Australian people. The grand promises, the towering rhetoric, have turned to dust. This Prime Minister has failed to deliver on his promises to date, and there is little hope that he will ever deliver on any of his promises.

It is worth remembering that this was a Prime Minister who promised to govern as an economic conservative. He inherited a $20 billion budget surplus and turned it into a $57 billion deficit, one of the highest deficits on record—this from a Prime Minister who said he would keep a rein on spending. He promised to commit to evidence based policy making—and what a cruel hoax that has turned out to be. The hallmarks of the waste and reckless mismanagement would be the home insulation scheme, the school halls program, the rorts, rip-offs and reckless spending. That program now has the ignominy of being the most reckless spending program in Australian political history. What of his promise to turn aside the asylum-seeker boats? People smugglers now have our Navy on speed dial. We have a record number of boats coming to our shores—and the Prime Minister promised to turn the boats back. (Time expired)

See this speech in context