Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Quite often in this place, a member from the other side refers to my previous employment with the former Prime Minister. It happened again today, and this time it was the member for Blair, and followed his speech on telecommunications. I cannot tell you what the member for Blair did in a previous life—I think he is one of the 80 per cent who are former union delegates—however, it did twig my memory of something that occurred for a short period in this place on Thursday afternoons. In 2005, when the now Deputy Prime Minister was the Leader of Opposition Business in this place, she would use the Thursday afternoon adjournment debate as an opportunity for a rant about members of the then government. Hansard records that the first time she did so, on 10 March 2005, she said she was pleased to report on a new innovation from the then opposition. She said that they would conduct a weekly wrap in the Thursday afternoon adjournment—it turned into a fortnightly wrap shortly after—and that it would be inclusive of an awards ceremony. It was all very clever stuff. It was based on politics, it was very personal and it was very nasty, which will not surprise anyone in this place. It was not about substance; it was about politics. Thus, given the performance of the Deputy Prime Minister on issues relating to her portfolio over the last two weeks, I thought it would be worth while discussing them. The first issue, of course, is the complete and utter disaster—the waste and mismanagement—of the Building the Education Revolution program. This week we have asked the Deputy Prime Minister just about every question possible, and all we have had in response have been arrogantly dismissive answers, a refusal to concede that she has failed to implement this policy properly and a refusal to take any responsibility herself.

The first of these disasters is the spending on the primary schools program and all the waste and mismanagement which has been shown to be associated with this program. This has been shown to have been so badly planned and managed that parents and friends committees are now actually trying to refuse the free money. This should not surprise anyone given that the Deputy Prime Minister guessed that only 90 per cent of schools would actually accept the free money in the first place, even though they are not required to apply as she answered in this place yesterday. It is quite extraordinary.

My electorate has two of these examples where schools that could be upgraded have seen waste and mismanagement unlike what we have ever seen before. Waste and mismanagement are damaging our future, creating debt that will live with our children and our grandchildren for years to come. Today we saw the Deputy Prime Minister describe these questions as ‘nitpicking’. A $1.7 billion blow-out is nitpicking! You cannot ask this Deputy Prime Minister anything without it being arrogantly dismissed.

There has been another policy disaster that has received less attention this week—the award modernisation process. Last week it received a fair bit of attention in the press. When this policy was announced, the Deputy Prime Minister said that no worker would be worse off and no business would face greater labour costs. This was a promise that could never be implemented. Joe de Bruyn says so, Professor Andrew Stewart, who advised the government on how to write their fair work laws, says so and Paul Howes from the AWU says so. But rather than be honest the Deputy Prime Minister has tried to bluff her way through and bluff the Australian people. We saw last week an extraordinary performance on The 7.30 Report when the Deputy Prime Minister said black was white and white was black. When she was consistently pursued on the issue of no worker being worse off or no business facing higher labour costs, which is the promise that she made in February 2008, she could not answer. In fact she ignored all the evidence to the contrary and said that it was going well.

But finally this week it took the Minister for Finance and Deregulation to tell the truth, and he did that on Sky News’s Agenda on Tuesday morning when he said that the ‘no worker worse off’ promise was for comfort. In other words, ‘We could not deliver this, but we had to spin the line; we had to tell them that they would not be any worse off.’ All of this has led journalist Ross Fitzgerald to describe the Deputy Prime Minister as ‘all foam, no beer’.

The Deputy Prime Minister is clearly good at practising and preaching a line but, given her policy history—starting with Medicare Gold—it is time she showed the Australian people that she can deliver on substance. Hopefully these two weeks will result in the Deputy Prime Minister focusing on her job and putting substance above spin.