Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

Ah, because it is in the legislation! The wonderful thing about this place is that we are masters of our own destiny and legislation can be changed. Legislation is often changed, legislation is often amended. While I appreciate your contribution, Senator McLucas, I do not think anyone falls for that furphy either because amending legislation is what we do. I do not think people across the country are going to be comforted by the fact that it says in the legislation that the levy will be in place for only 12 months.

People simply have stopped trusting the Prime Minister and this government—if they ever did—because they know that this government says one thing and does another. They know that the words that come from this government do not translate into action. This government has absolutely no vision for the future. There are no substantive policies, and people out there in the Australian community are waking up to that big time. This assistance for flood victims is a tax that should not be placed on the Australian people—it is as simple as that. The one key thought that the Australian people need to keep in mind is that the only reason this flood tax is even being debated, the only reason that we are discussing it as a mechanism to fund assistance to flood victims, is that this Labor government under Julia Gillard and under Kevin Rudd before her—and who knows who is coming next, maybe Bill Shorten or Greg Combet, maybe Stephen Smith; it could be anyone—has no ability whatsoever to manage the economy. It has no ability to make sure that its finances are in order so that when things like the terrible disasters in Queensland happen they can be funded.

The best way to fund assistance for those people is through a surplus. The best way to fund assistance for those people is to have a government that can manage money, and in this Gillard Labor government the Australian people certainly do not have one of those governments. There is waste, mismanagement of money, broken promises—as we saw from the Prime Minister on the carbon tax—and the Australian people can expect a lot more of those things because leopards do not change their spots and this government is not going to change the fact that it is unable to manage the economy and steer this country to any kind of sustainable future.