Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister came to office on 15 September last year promising a new approach. He would be different, he assured us. Here is what he said as he announced his challenge for the Liberal Party leadership in the Senate courtyard on 14 September:

… we need a different style of leadership. We need a style of leadership that explains those challenges and opportunities; explains the challenges and how to seize the opportunities. A style of leadership that respects the peoples’ intelligence, that explains these complex issues, and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take, and makes a case for it. We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.

He promised us no more of the brashness of the man he deposed, the member for Warringah. He promised: no more of the meanness and the divisiveness that characterised the miserable Abbott government—no more of its trademark hostility for anyone who held a view different to its own. These promises matter. The Prime Minister loves the sound of his own voice, make no mistake, but these were not idle musings. They were, and they are, the entire premise of the Turnbull government. They were the entire justification for the Prime Minister rolling his predecessor. They were the justification for the immense political and policy disruption this caused and continues to cause. But how hollow those promises have proved to be.

As soon as the Prime Minister faced his first real challenges, as soon as he was called upon to actually do something rather than just talk and talk, he abandoned the measured, calm and rational approach he promised us. Today in question time—caught empty handed by an opposition rolling out detailed, considered policy—the Prime Minister did his best impersonation of the member for Warringah, and it really was uncanny. He ranted and raved at the dispatch box, trying his best to whip up a desperate scare campaign about Labor's tax policies. It was vintage Abbott. The member for Warringah must have been deeply flattered by the imitation.

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