Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I may have only been here for a little under two years, but every so often I see a new low reached. It seems that, no matter what the issue, those opposite seek to throw around the words ‘Work Choices’. Representatives of the Australian Labor Party come into this place—many of them having come from trade union backgrounds—and talk about ‘advertising scare campaigns not based on fact’, and they do it with a straight face. That requires a level of gumption that I do not have. The newspaper tells me that the ad campaigns being run by the miners have some of the same people involved in them as the Kevin 07 advertising campaign did. That was a real scare campaign. That is the campaign that is scaring Australians today as they remember what happened 2½ years ago. I assume the Labor Party will start to disown that.

It was the Prime Minister who described advertising as a ‘sick cancer’ on our democracy. I suppose it goes with the ‘great moral challenge’. I suppose it becomes yet another piece of flowery rhetoric that is being discarded by this government that cannot live up to the words of the Prime Minister as he seeks to moralise rather than govern. They claim, after only two years, that the Auditor-General effectively made it too difficult for them to run the advertising campaigns they wished to run. Their advertising campaign today could best be summed up as a PowerPoint presentation—a person in front of a PowerPoint slide. I cannot image a better summary of this Prime Minister than something out of The Hollowmen: an advertising campaign that will put people to sleep, as even government members will acknowledge.

We heard from Senator Ronaldson earlier that once ‘extraordinary’ reasons are now ‘compelling’ reasons. The only thing that was compelling in this campaign was the desperation of the Australian Labor Party as it realised that the tax it blindsided Australians with was in no way going to save it from the debacle of its mismanagement of pink batts, green loans and myriad other issues. That became the compelling reason for this campaign.

The Hawke review used the Australian Electoral Commission’s unique status as the veil under which the ALP thought it could dance away from its commitments. The Prime Minister thought: ‘Here we go. The Australian Electoral Commission is a bit unique. We will use this excuse to dance away from our commitment about describing something as a sick cancer.’ But this veil has been lifted, and the Australian people quite frankly do not like what they are seeing. What they are seeing is the underbelly of the Australian Labor Party using taxpayer funds to campaign for a policy thought-bubble that has no draft legislation and has not been brought before this parliament. We see no indication of it coming any time soon. This is nothing short of a series of campaign ads—bad though they are—for the Labor Party to try to dig itself out of a political hole.

This brings me to the time line. Just prior to me speaking, Senator Furner spoke about the four days between 24 May and 28 May as if it was December. These were not four average days; these were the days when the Finance and Public Administration Committee of this Senate was holding estimates hearings. The committee rearranged its timetable to accommodate Senator Ludwig’s personal timetable to discuss government advertising on the Thursday morning, the 27^th, at the request of the minister. These were not four average days—four quiet days; this was an issue in these estimates hearings. The estimates committee changed its schedule to accommodate the minister. Despite having the draft statement for four days, he did not see any reason to inform the estimates committee, nor did he find any reason to table out of session the statement outlining that he had exempted this advertising campaign from his own guidelines. He could have done so but he chose not to.

This government are now learning the lesson of Nixon: it is not the action that gets you into trouble; it is the cover-up. What we have here is an attempt by the government to avoid scrutiny, and they have been caught out. They have been caught out by tabling this statement after Senate estimates hearings had concluded. Then they acquiesced in this chamber to allow those estimates hearings to be reconvened last week. I cannot think of another example where something like that has been slipped out at 9.30 the next day—as a number of us were at the airport leaving after estimates hearings—in order to specifically avoid scrutiny.

No-one believes that to delete two paragraphs of a statement and turn it from a nine-paragraph statement to a seven-paragraph statement takes four working days—four working days in this building while this was an issue discussed in those hearings. This delay was not due to the decision Senator Ludwig took; it was due to this government trying to craft the language to justify the decision they took. The decision to exempt and declare this partisan advertising campaign a ‘compelling reason’, albeit one for the Labor Party, had already been taken. What the minister was trying to do was avoid scrutiny and come up with language that would not make the government look bad, and he has been caught out.

Why will the minister not show us the draft? The minister is not keen for us to see those extra two paragraphs, those extra couple of hundred words. He says he took four days to delete those two paragraphs and table it in the Senate. No-one believes that. The minister should table in this Senate and make public the draft statement so that we know what took four days. I am certain that those four days were only used to try to craft the language to make this government look a little better. But it cannot because this decision stands very clearly in contradiction to the language they used themselves.

This government is simply trying to claim credit for a policy it implemented and junked. You do not get to claim political credit saying, ‘We were being all good two years ago but we have decided to be bad now.’ That is its only defence. Just like everything else about this Labor Party, this government only wants to speak about the opposition. It does not want to be tested against its own record. It avoids being tested against its own words. It wants to talk about the opposition—and it always brings up Work Choices whenever it can. The only thing I would say to that is that the Penrith by-election made clear that—with the little stunt with T-shirts—that did not have the traction that the Labor Party thought it might. According to this government, a small cancer is okay. We can have a small cancer on our democracy because its only defence is that it is smaller than it once was.

I would like briefly to turn to the tax itself which is the subject of this advertising campaign. Contrary to specific government commitments, there was no consultation with industry about this tax. They were blindsided like everyone else was on 2 May. It is a flawed tax based on flawed assumptions. Former finance minister and senator in this place, Peter Walsh, made the comment that the only barrier to a resolution of this was the current Prime Minister. Another comment that is of particular interest is that in his own memoirs, where he says that ‘there is rarely if ever any economic rent in iron ore’. He said that in his memoirs. He said it was different to oil, petroleum and gold, but this government sees it differently. Then again, I suppose this Labor Party has spent the last 2½ years running away from the Hawke years back into the arms of the Whitlam years and now, as it attempts to take national stakes in key industries, it is in some ways running back to the Chifley years.

The motives of this government with respect to this tax are betrayed by its attempt to apply it to existing projects. Those existing projects do not get the alleged benefit of the 40 per cent allowance for capital. It is simply a grab for money to try to fill the government’s budget black hole, which has been created by its unprecedented spending—spending which it did not flag in any way before the last election when, on the hills of Nambour, the Prime Minister was describing himself as an economic conservative.

There are myriad issues with this tax that this government is trying to hide with its advertising campaign. Royalties are the property of the states. The Commonwealth cannot seek to take those unconstitutionally. The royalties are the property of the states. They do not belong to all Australians in a legal sense. We also have the Commonwealth Grants Commission, which quite effectively redistributes income from those states which have a resource bounty compared to those that do not—and that is nearly a century-old tradition.

I will conclude with this: the key flaw in this tax—which this government is trying to hoodwink the Australian people into with its advertising campaign—is that, unlike petroleum, gold and other precious metals, iron ore and some of our key mineral exports are not rare. What is rare is the investment required to take them to market—to get them out of the ground, to get them on ships, or however they are to be transported, and to get them to market. This government is making a fundamental miscalculation in assuming that this tax can be introduced without impacting future investment levels in Australia—and this advertising campaign will not save it.