Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When we get up to speak on the grievance debate we obviously have a grievance. My grievance is that Australia has, in my opinion, a most incompetent, untrustworthy, directionless Labor government that seems to make things up as it goes along. For example, there have been seven changes to the carbon tax that it promised would never happen. There have been five versions of the mining tax, along with flip-flops on anything from live cattle exports to fishing trawlers, which I will speak about later.

Labor has a $120 billion budget black hole, and it is getting bigger by the day. Australians are paying $20 million every single day just on Labor's interest repayments on its net $145 billion of debt—which only grows as Labor racks up more deficit. The idea that somehow they will deliver a surplus this year is laughable. I know many people find it hard to recognise the difference between a million and a billion and what effect it has. I like to say to people, look at it this way: a million seconds is about 12 days but a billion seconds is 34 years. I think we all realise there is a lot of difference between 12 days and 34 years. We have a government that seems to be addicted to debt and that is continually running up that debt. We have no expectation of a surplus in this financial year, and I think MYEFO will prove that later in the year.

Labor is busy scrambling to find ways of putting off dealing with this budget black hole until after the next election. I find it quite interesting that this federal government attacks state governments for trying to get back into surplus when it is trying to get back into surplus, even though it is not going to be successful, and the reason the state governments are having to make cuts is that we have had Labor governments in charge for too long at state level and they have just run up the debts. Frankly, these are all signs of a government that is divided and directionless and that is all about politics—it really has no plan for the future except to spend more money.

Here is another example of how bad this government is. For four years Australia's borders have been weak and lives have been lost at sea—at least 700 people have died trying to come to Australia by boat. Australia's reputation with its neighbours has been tarnished, costs have blown out and people smuggling has flourished, all because Julia Gillard and the Labor Party were too stubborn to admit that they got it wrong. The same stubbornness that rejected Nauru for years and that rejected Manus Island for years is still rejecting other proven policies such as temporary protection visas and turning the boats around when it is safe to do so.

When we left government at the end of 2007 there were four people in detention and no children. We had deterred this horrible trade. Now there are more children in detention than ever in Australia's history. The problem will not be fixed by the present policy, because the government is sitting on this one-legged stool with only one of the three important policies that will deter boat people from coming to Australia and risking their lives. They have to use TPVs, as we did, and they have to have the threat of turning those boats around. We have been consistent on border protection policy as a coalition; in contrast, Labor has held just about every position under the sun on border protection. The simple fact is that the Australian people cannot trust them.

I was very disturbed last week when it came to the declared fishing activities and the so-called supertrawler. My first thought on this, like many other people, was, 'Well, I would be a bit concerned if we had this supertrawler that didn't have controls on it and was going to outfish fisheries and basically ruin our objective of sustainable fisheries around Australia.' I can understand people being concerned, especially when there was a Greenpeace campaign and a GetUp! Campaign to say, 'We should stop this supertrawler.' What happened is that we have now bungled the whole decision. We completely bungled this bill, or the government did, over four days, and they had four different amendments. How do you expect to run a government when you have that sort of situation—where the government just does not know what it is doing.

I actually think the first ruling that the Environment minister made on the Monday, I think it was, of last week, when he said, 'We're going to put some extra controls in to make sure that it's not going to be overfished, that we are not going to affect seals and dolphins,' was a rational decision. It is a bit like the live cattle dispute, where the minister actually got up and said, 'Look, we're not going to allow four or five of the abattoirs in Indonesia to be used, but let's look at leaving the rest as they are pending an investigation.' But, in both cases, the government panicked. They panicked on a Greens campaign.

This company had been in negotiations with the government for seven years. They had ticked all the boxes. They had even said they were prepared to accept the extra conditions put on them by the minister last Monday. Now, they have spent a lot of money investing. They were actually encouraged by the government to have this efficient way of doing things. What a lot of people do not realise is that not one fish will be saved. The quota is still there. There will not be an efficient trawler doing the job and processing on board instead of coming backwards and forwards. Of course, if you have six or seven boats doing that, that is going to produce a lot more CO2 out in the atmosphere than if you one that could stay out there to do the processing and be part of the quota. The quota is still there. It has not changed. The same 18,000 tonnes will be fished, whether it is done by one big boat or several boats. It really does have a lot of similarities to the live cattle debacle. This is a government that is folding under the pressure of public relations and not sticking to the science.

I have just been to a science dinner, which I have had to leave. I know—I think we all know—how important science is, but in this case the science has been rejected for political reasons. We actually set up the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, AFMA, to use the science to make sure that we have sustainable fisheries. In fact, they even used the precautionary principle. Instead of saying, 'We're using the normal 20 per cent figure of the total catch'—in fact, not that long ago it was 30 per cent of the total catch—they came down to 10 per cent just to make sure that they were not doing the wrong thing.

This is a failed government with failed policies. There is not just one failed policy; there are a multitude of failed policies. Who can forget pink batts resulting in four deaths and hundreds of houses catching fire, not to mention the rorts that resulted from that program? There was the so-called Building the Education Revolution program, where $7 billion was wasted, GroceryWatch, Fuelwatch—all these things that never turned out to be genuine policies. The list goes on. But of course we have the biggie, the carbon tax, a broken promise that does not work. (Time expired)