Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question. Let us go through it piece by piece. The minerals resource rent tax is being consulted through the Policy Transition Group and the legislation will be brought before the parliament. Then, of course, the opposition will face a fundamental choice—whether they will continue to maintain their opposition to a tax that Australia’s biggest miners have agreed to pay and stand in the way of a reduction in company tax to achieve balanced economic growth, stand in the way of tax breaks for small business, stand in the way of better superannuation for Australians and an increase in national savings and stand in the way of $6 billion of productivity-improving infrastructure. That will be a choice for the Leader of the Opposition.

On the question of tackling climate change, I do not believe in the Leader of the Opposition’s simple slogans. I believe in using the opportunities of this new parliament through the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee to address the question of pricing carbon. I reiterate to the Leader of the Opposition: if he ever wakes up to the fact that the reform road is not a demolition derby then he will be welcome, if he wants to, to join with the government in real efforts to tackle climate change and pricing carbon, to join the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee and to do something constructive rather than to seek to wreck.

On the third point that the Leader of the Opposition raises, what I said to the Australian people before the election, when I spoke to the Lowy Institute, was that this was a complex problem. Unlike the Leader of the Opposition, I was not going to use simple three-word slogans. Unlike the Leader of the Opposition, I was going to be truthful about the dimensions of the problem. I would not degenerate to using terminology like ‘armada of boats’ or ‘peaceful invasion’. I would explain factually to the Australian people the dimensions of the problem and the regional protection framework and regional processing centre that I believe is important to the solution. In government, we have worked on that methodically, with the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship in the region just before the parliament sat pursuing dialogue on these questions.

At some point the Leader of the Opposition needs to think through whether really his political cause is advanced by being someone who is known for wrecking or whether his political cause is advanced by returning to the Liberal Party of old, which was a reform-advocating political institution. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, as I said last night, that for us to seize the benefits of prosperity, coming out as we have as strong from the global financial crisis, we need to keep walking the reform road. Now is not the time to lead the Liberal Party away from the post-1983 consensus on economic reform. Now is not the time to lead the Liberal Party into economic Hansonism. Now is not the time to conclude that the way forward for the Liberal Party is to conduct itself as a demolition derby on the reform road.

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