Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 24 June it will be one year since Prime Minister Gillard forced Kevin Rudd from his job as Prime Minister of Australia and Leader of the Labor Party.

An opposition member: Injustice day.

That is right. It was an early evening coup, designed by the brains trust of the Labor Party, which delivered three New South Wales premiers in just on three years: Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees and Kristina Keneally. The New South Wales Labor right joined with the Victorian right and the Australian Workers Union to dispatch the member for Griffith—luminaries such as Mark Arbib, Bill Shorten and the Secretary of the AWU, Paul Howes.

After Prime Minister Julia Gillard was installed she said that the government had been losing its way, that it had gone off track. She promised to be different. She promised that she would listen, that she would establish a community consensus for action on the issue of pricing carbon. Before the last election she said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government that I lead.' Yet what has she done? Weeks after being handed government by the Greens and the Independents, she broke that promise. She has acted in concert with the Greens to impose a price on carbon before taking it to the Australian people. This will harm the Australian economy, it will export jobs, it will increase the cost of living for all Australians and it will place us ahead of the rest of the world in doing just this. The Productivity Commission tells us that no country currently imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse gas emissions or has in place an economy-wide ETS. Clearly, Labor wants Australia to go it alone on a carbon tax because it is a demand of the Greens.

The Housing Industry Association have estimated that the average price of a new house will go up by $6,000 as a result of this carbon tax. They have estimated that it will add almost $13,000 to mortgage repayments over the life of a typical mortgage, or close to $50 per month in repayments. According to the government's own figures for a carbon price of $26 a tonne, this will raise electricity bills by 25 per cent, add 6.5c a litre to petrol prices and increase the cost of groceries by five per cent. And that is just at $26 per tonne. The Greens want it to be $40 to start with and over $100 later.

This is a terrible record for this current government, a record of failure and of incompetence. One year on, on this issue alone, it is clear that the government is not holding to its promises. While the government wastes time managing its political image, it is ignoring pleas from the electorate to address basic issues such as education, health, employment, industrial relations and the cost of living. These are the slow-burning issues that do not always get the same media attention but nevertheless have a significant impact on people's lives. The real tragedy of this government is that these basic issues are being shoved aside as it desperately tries to revive its political fortunes.

On each of these fundamental issues the government is about to create real hardship for ordinary Australians. On education, the government has refused to rule out freezing the indexation for school funding after 2013. Parents who pay their tax and work hard to give their children the best education they can afford are now faced with a new unknown. Schools that need funding to pay teacher salaries, improve classrooms and invest in new learning technologies are now faced with increased costs. In real terms it will cost $29 million to the schools in my electorate of Higgins by 2017. This is on top of the waste and mismanagement that has already taken place with a $16 billion BER school halls blowout, which has cost twice the price to implement in government schools as it has in independent schools—a real national tragedy.

On health the government is committed to means testing the private health insurance rebate, making it more expensive for families and individuals to purchase private health insurance. In my electorate of Higgins, 77 per cent of residents have this private health insurance and it will impact them directly. The rebate has proved an effective means of allowing more people to cover themselves in case of injury or ill health and, importantly, of taking pressure off the public health system. But once again Labor has created more uncertainty for Australians by refusing to rule out changes or ease cost of living pressures.

Contrast this political opportunism with the positive policies put forward by the coalition. We have introduced policies to cut red tape for small business. We have proposed new policies for water management, including the construction of new dams to secure our future water supply. We have supported Welfare to Work reform and we have proposed our own four-point plan for participation. We have put forward a $1.9 billion mental health package which, unlike Labor's plan, does not involve taking funding out of existing mental health programs. We have insisted that we will cut Labor's wasteful spending— (Time expired)