Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I think the member for Ballarat is going to miss it by two minutes, so I'll make the contribution. Today we have seen the transformation of a Prime Minister to the point where there is, in fact, nothing left. I remember when we had the very first couple of weeks of parliament after the 2013 election. The member for Warringah came in here with a clever little catchphrase—a name-calling exercise that he would engage in—for the Leader of the Opposition. This week we saw almost exactly the same game—almost exactly the same playbook of having a play on someone's name.

To think that this is the Prime Minister who said he was going to bring a more civilised debate. This is the Prime Minister who said he would be able to provide a more intelligent debate than the member for Warringah. Today and this whole week, we've seen it has actually become verbatim the exact same template. The economic policy is the same. The marriage equality policy is the same. The rhetoric is the same. Who would have thought the climate policy would also end up being exactly the same? Who would have thought that that leader who, years ago, crossed the floor to vote for Labor's energy policies would now stand there as Prime Minister, ridiculing Labor's energy policies? He's not just ridiculing Labor's policies now, but the exact policies that he had voted for.

This party has become so driven with chaos that they are in a situation where to do something about energy prices there are two actions they can take right now: they can act on the gas trigger, and they can act on a clean energy target. But they can't act on the gas trigger because we don't know if the Deputy Prime Minister is lawfully here, and they can't act on a clean energy target because the member for Warringah says they're not allowed to. He says they're not allowed to.

After the Finkel report came out, the leader of the government, the Prime Minister, gave all the reasons he thought the clean energy target was a good idea. He would go out there, backing it in, giving arguments as to why the clean energy target was the right way forward and the right solution. Then, on Tuesday, in one party room, the member for Warringah utters one sentence. Now, when we ask the Prime Minister, 'Does he support a clean energy target—yes or no?' he doesn't answer the question because he's no longer sure. He doesn't know what he will be told to believe. What he does know is that, whatever he's told to believe, he will believe it passionately. He will back it in. He will back in hard whatever he's told his beliefs are.

I was no fan of the member for Warringah. I was no fan of the member for Warringah as the previous Prime Minister, but at least we knew who we had. At least we knew who we had in that job, whereas now we've got somebody like a barrister with a brief, opening the folder and asking: 'Okay, what am I meant to argue today? What am I meant to believe today?' That's why, when they don't have any policies they can agree on, the only thing they can agree on is how much they hate the opposition. It doesn't matter what we ask, every answer is: 'This is how Labor is so bad. This is why we don't like Labor.'

It went to peak weirdness over that two-week break, when all of a sudden they decided to run this new argument that the Labor opposition was all about communism. We heard about Cuba, we heard about East Germany and we heard about the Berlin Wall. I've got to say, you've got to feel for the Russian revolutionaries. If only they knew that their whole battle was actually about reining in concessions on negative gearing. How would Castro's revolutionaries have felt if they knew that the whole struggle was actually about an extra half a per cent on the top marginal income tax rate?

.And yet these conspiracy theories are not being run by some random backbencher who they push out the door. No, these are people who used to be viewed as credible. The Minister for Finance is the one with the Berlin Wall conspiracy. The Minister for Foreign Affairs takes on the New Zealand conspiracy. And then, when they're finally asked a straight question about whether or not energy prices are going up or down in ordinary households, they claim they're going down. Well, I've got to say: go back to your electorates and run that argument. Go back to your electorates after this and ask. I remember sitting in opposition when John Howard made a similar claim— (Time expired)

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