Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Unfortunately, this debate has declined significantly. Some elements of humour do not cover the types of references that have been covered by opposition senators. Rather than argue their point—and I will come to what I think has been the main point in this debate—we get the sort of rhetoric that came from Senator Joyce about ‘brothels of ideas’ and ‘deflowerings’ and ‘being used’. We get all sorts of opinion as to the character of the Prime Minister from people who know very little about the man—in fact, from the same people who said very different things about John Howard when he was in government. I seem to recall reports about Senator Brandis’s references to John Howard as ‘the rat’, and yet he has the arrogance to come in here and say that our Prime Minister has no character and to claim that the very same Mr Howard is a man whom he holds in great regard.

In my short time today, I want to concentrate on what I think has been the main point—which Senator Brandis alluded to—and that is: this is about honouring promises. This is not about keeping promises regardless of changed circumstances; this is about having a plan, having an agenda and honouring the promises you have made. The best example I can give, just by virtue of my personal experience in this area and in the past, is what I would characterise as the national agenda for children. We refer to it as a national agenda for early childhood in Australia, but I recall when the minister of the day back in the early 2000s said that the Howard government would eventually introduce a national agenda for children. He claimed this for roughly five years. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited, and nothing happened.

Perhaps one of the most audacious claims of this opposition, when they mark their little tick boxes for what promises have been kept and what promises have not been kept, is when they talk about the 260 childcare centres that were part of our broader strategy of a national agenda for early childhood, because those centres were designed to rectify what the previous government had done to the market in child care. The promises that it made at that time were never kept. The promises of Barnaby Joyce’s former colleague Larry Anthony were never kept. The ministerial standards and the character that were meant to be part of the Howard government never occurred. That man left this parliament and went on to be a director of ABC child care and took fees from them during this process. I was only reminded a couple of weeks ago when he appeared in the Federal Court. We have seen the details of his consultant’s fees, his director’s fees and his lobbying on behalf of ABC child care, yet this opposition has the audacity to say that, because there are now changed circumstances in the market for long day care places, we have adjusted our policies in that area. We have, for some very good reasons which the government is able to justify and which are supported by the sector. Not only did we need to spend $58-odd million to rectify the problems around ABC child care—