David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

On a day when so many hardworking Australians, particularly Western Australians, have travelled up to almost 4,000 kilometres to come to Canberra to express their lack of trust, faith and confidence in this Gillard government, it gives me no pleasure to talk about the trust, integrity and honesty of this Gillard government. Many, many Australians—the vast majority of Australians—have come to the conclusion in the last 12 months that this government is untrustworthy. That this government is not trusted by Australians is almost a universally accepted truth. Why is that? Why is it that Australians do not trust this government or this Prime Minister? Look no further than the calibre of its ministers and the leadership of the Prime Minister.

This Prime Minister has a very significant problem with one important aspect of public life. Some might say that this ability is an imperative in public life, a condition precedent to public life, a fundamental element in public life. And that is the capacity to tell the truth. The capacity to tell the truth is the most fundamental thing any individual can bring to parliament. On Kevin Rudd's leadership, she said, 'There is more chance that I would be full-forward for the Dogs than leading the Australian Labor Party.' She said at the time of the last election, 'We will have an East Timor processing centre,' and of course 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,' and 'Petrol will be exempt under the carbon tax.' Every Western Australian knows they receive their petrol via a truck weighing more than 4.5 tonnes. Are those truck drivers going to carry that cross? Of course they are not, and the Prime Minister knew it when she said that. There will be a carbon tax on petrol, and people living in regional Australia will be paying it through the nose. She well knows it. The Caltex refinery is one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide in Australia. They are unhappy with the compensation. What does that mean? It means they will pass the costs on. There will be a cost on petrol.

Of course the crowning glory of this last fortnight was when she said that she has confidence in Mr Craig Thomson. No, she has not. She has no confidence in Craig Thomson, but she has to say she does to cling with her fingernails to power. That is what she has to say. She has got no confidence whatsoever in this man, against whom the facts and the evidence are accumulating day by day, minute by minute. As set out by my colleague Senator Joyce, someone broke in, stole his credit card and forged his signature and then broke back in and put it back again. These are fundamental issues of trust, integrity and honesty. The recent history of this Prime Minister is such that she is failing those tests, day by day, minute by minute, hour by hour.

When we talk about maladministration we talk about one fundamental quality that ministers can bring to the parliament—a degree, a small iota, of competence. That is all we ask for: just a hint, just a sniff, of competence. This government delivers nothing of the sort—just the opposite. Peter Garrett, the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, has established new lows in lack of confidence. The pink batt home insulation scheme was so good that people would fly into Australia, get a phone book and a book of the application forms, fill them out and send them off, the money would arrive in a post office box and then they would fly back to somewhere in South-East Asia. That is how good that scheme was. Then we had to pay billions of dollars to fix up those homes and make them fireproof. The most interesting fact of all is that 10,000 of those installers never lodged a tax return. It was the craziest, stupidest and most poorly administered scheme in the history of good governance. The BER had the same problem. The tax commissioner is flat out trying to find out who is paying tax for the BER. The returns are down.

This government, through its incompetent ministers, has wasted somewhere between $5 billion and $7.5 billion. The Leader of the Government in the Senate mentioned the Super Seasprite in question time today. There were six Super Seasprites—unbelievable! We have the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry giving precedence in Australian public policy to a television program. This is a news-cycle-led government, a government that responds only to Four Corners, so the minister banned live exports to Indonesia with the stroke of a pen, leaving thousands of cattle in pens at ports around Australia having to be fed and managed—$320 million worth of industry chopped off at the knees overnight, with no notice, no consultation and no compensation. The government has no understanding. As I say, the minister brings massive amounts of incompetence to the table. These animals cannot be returned to pasture, because the pastures have faded in the seasonal nature of animal husbandry in the north of Australia. He took no advice from his department. A thousand or more jobs evaporated overnight on the end of his pen, many of them Aboriginal jobs. As precious as those jobs are, he just struck them out. If incompetence were an Olympic sport we would be red-hot favourites for the gold medal. We would be at our TVs, watching day in, day out.

Who is paying for all this mess? Who is paying for the $7 billion that has been just flushed down the drain? All those hard-working Australians who get up out of bed every day, go to work and pay their taxes, and particularly those in the booming, hard-working state of Western Australia—the powerhouse economy. That is who is paying for all of this. What do they get for their trouble? A mining tax. If you are successful under Labor, what does it do with you? It taxes the living daylights out of you. Magnetite is a huge industry for Western Australia. The magnetite industry does not want any handouts—it just wants government off its back—but the mining tax has spelt significant capital raising difficulties for the industry. The government knows this and has set about the task of killing the industry. What does it do to the mining industry? In addition to the mining tax, the government brings in a carbon tax. For people living in regional Australia, their fuel and groceries and everything else they freight into their towns will be much more expensive because every truck over 4.5 tonnes will have to pay the carbon tax. How do they come up with these schemes? This public policy fiasco is just typical.

I turn lastly to the absolute disgrace of border protection. This government cannot even protect our borders. Most of our Navy ships do not work. But, apart from that, we have people coming in in droves. In 2010, 85 boats carrying 4,939 people came in an unauthorised way to our shores. It is costing us $1.75 billion. No trust, no competence.