Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

My goodness! The member for Fraser is clearly a man of enormous integrity—of great integrity, I would say, by the way in which he carries himself—but he has let himself down with this contribution. He had an opportunity today to show some remorse for misleading those 95,000 members of the seat of Fraser in the ACT. He had said to those people that under no circumstances would a Labor government in which he became a member introduce a carbon tax. Three weeks later the story had changed. A man of his integrity, a man of such upright standing in the ACT—a former lecturer, of all things—would surely seek to take any opportunity to clear his name, to demonstrate his integrity, to show that he was not seeking to deliberately mislead the people of Fraser. We are giving him a chance with this bill—a bill that he did not in fact address for more than 10 seconds of his 20-minute diatribe. I do not know what it was, to be honest. We have been in a parallel universe for the last 20 minutes. He did his best, yet at no stage did he grasp the opportunity that we are presenting this government to go to the people with a vote without the risk of losing government. That is what the plebiscite is all about. That is what the member for Fraser should have concerned himself with. We want to understand why this government is refusing to support this bill? What is their fear of going to the people, especially when there are no consequences from an electoral point of view? We were giving you that opportunity. If you were a man of integrity you would have taken it. You would have referred to it, you would have talked about it, you would have given us reasons other than some nonsense from centuries ago that you were referring to.

It is a very clear proposition. The Carbon Tax Plebiscite Bill 2011 in practical terms gives the government—a weak government; a characterless government; a government of no authority, no presence, no vision—a chance at least to seek to regain some modicum of trust and respectability within the community. Why is the community not listening to the leader of the government? Why have the people turned off? Why is there a crisis of confidence, which is more important? Here is your opportunity to start to restore some confidence back into the community. We have a crisis of confidence in this government. This government has created a circumstance in which only three weeks into a new term of office they betrayed the people who voted for them. They broke the trust of the people who voted for them. People thought they went to the election committed to not introducing a carbon tax. Do you think this government would have won if they had said they were going to introduce a carbon tax? Not on your nelly—there was not a prospect they would be on the government benches. They misled people to vote for them to get into government and within a matter of three weeks they had broken their word. This is an act of betrayal to the people who voted for them at the last election.

This government has been given a chance by us to correct that great sin of betrayal that they perpetrated and this Prime Minister perpetrated—and I suspect led many people of integrity on the other side to mouth her words, to mouth her promises, to go along with the charade that this Prime Minister presented to the people before the last election—then to break it within a matter of three weeks in order to stay in government in a grubby deal done with the Greens. We have seen nothing for the last 12 months but an agenda which has been dominated by the Greens and the crossbenchers. There is not one issue that you can refer to, really, that has not been dictated by the crossbenchers and the Greens. This is a pathetic situation.

There are people out there who are deeply concerned. You cannot walk in the street in Melbourne where I live—or go to the airport or go anywhere in Australia—without people stopping you on the street, people you have never known, never spoken to. Even my Labor mates are saying to me: 'What can you do to get rid of that mob? What can you do to bring on an election?' At least what you can do is make sure this carbon tax—this thing which is a demonstration of the lack of empathy and identification with the problems people are facing—is nipped in the bud, that this thing is stopped in its tracks.

At a time when the exchange rate is at a level it has never been at, at a time when half the economy is in recession and the other half booming, at a time when people are facing enormous cost of living pressures that they cannot deal with, people cannot understand for one minute that this government would persist with this idiotic carbon tax, which is dripping with intervention, dripping with socialism.

If you wanted to introduce a price on carbon in a way which is going to maximise the amount of intervention in hundreds of our biggest employers, you would bring in a carbon tax. I know this. I had the shadow ministry for climate change for a year when the previous Prime Minister was working up his model. This carbon tax will morph into exactly the same model that we were presented and rejected on two occasions. In fact its absence was supported at the last election by the vote that those opposite got in their lies to the Australian people, when the Prime Minister said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' That was a cast-iron commitment. It was deliberately said. It was said again and again in the last fortnight to make sure that people understood this. If the Prime Minister had not made that commitment, this government, which hangs on by the slimmest of margins—we won 750,000 more votes, we won one more seat—would have lost. They have the crossbenchers with, again, a series of grubby commitments.

Member for Fremantle, you tell me how you support this boatpeople business. You cannot sit there and tell me you are a person of integrity. So many people on the other side are people of integrity but they have been forced to succumb to the grubby betrayal of the Australian people by this Prime Minister and this government. I do not know how you hold your heads high at any stage. On so many fronts you have betrayed the Australian people. That is why we have a crisis of confidence.

Sovereign risk is associated with poor decisions. We have so many areas where there have been problems with this government: the BER, the pink batts, the health scheme. They promised to take over with a majority funding of health. All we have is mountains more bureaucrats. There was the PBS. The ink wasn't even dry on an 18-month deal and they broke it. Now we have, potentially, major new pharmaceutical companies, who spend $1 billion a year on R&D, quietly taking some of that out of the country. We have people who are deeply concerned about so many other areas. The live cattle job was pathetic. The insult that has been meted out to the Indonesian people is just profound: 40 per cent of their meat supply cut off with just a letter to the Indonesian government. They have had 100 years of humiliation from colonisation and other things and what do we do? We cut off the supply of 40 per cent of their meat to all of their people with only a letter provided to them. Who do we think we are as a country? They are our biggest neighbour—with 300 million people. They are a part of our future, no matter what you think. No matter what you think, they are good people and they are going to be a very big part of our future. And what do we do? This government offends them. It is a disgrace!

We are giving this government an opportunity to restore at least a very small modicum of trust and respectability by giving them a chance to have a vote which does not put their position as government in jeopardy—the position that they seem to be prepared to risk at any point. The support being given to the member for Dobell is sickening. Look at the evidence that comes out daily. Look at what we saw today from Fairfax—that he has lied; that he is a thief. Yet the Prime Minister stands up here daily and supports it. This government is causing a crisis of confidence in the Australian economy and is doing untold and long-term damage. This bill must be supported. (Time expired)

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