Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I only wish Hansard could pick up irony and sarcasm. When they are elected on this platform and when members of the House of Representatives are elected on this platform, it is right to question how they can break such a promise that is going to have such massive implications for this country (1) without proper scrutiny and (2) without actually taking it to the Australian people. These are common-sense questions that most Australians I know want to ask.

Despite the protestations of the Greens and those who are advocates and acolytes of the green agenda within the Labor Party, there is very little demand other than contrived, drummed up, astroturf support for this carbon tax out there in mainstream Australia. If you move more than five or 10 kilometres out from the major cities and you talk to the millions of Australians who are already struggling with the burdens placed upon them by this government, you will find that they do not want a carbon tax. They do not want a carbon tax, not because they do not care about the environment but because they know that it will do nothing for the environment. They know that it will not lower global temperatures one jot or tittle. We know that. We absolutely know that and no-one has ever disputed it. They also know that billions of their dollars are going to be sent offshore to unaccountable regimes or organisations. You are going to see it go to an international United Nations fund and you are also going to have to buy permits from nations which have a less than rigorous reputation for financial transparency and honesty. These are things that all concern us.

There is a more deliberate concern amongst the Australian people and that is that we have a government that have deceived the Australian people. I wish you could say that they had a deceptive aura of confidence or competence even, but unfortunately you cannot, because they have demonstrated no competence in any aspect of administering the national affairs of this country. We can look at it in so many ways—I touched upon pink batts and GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch. We can look at the rorting in Building the Education Revolution, as they called it. We can look at the laptops in schools rorting. We can look at border protection: the East Timor solution, the Malaysia solution. It can go on and on and on. It is one disaster after another. And today we are being asked to extend hours to be complicit in another disaster for the Australian people.

On this side of the chamber it is very clear that we will not support that and we will not support it because we want our integrity intact. We want to be consistent in our approach to taking effective policy solutions—not things that are going to damage the Australian people, not things that are going to irreparably damage our economy, not the myth of green jobs. We do not want the $17 billion that Barack Obama, President of the United States, spent on creating 3,545 jobs. We do not want that myth. We want accountability, we want strength and we want, most of all, competence from the Australian government.

Unfortunately, the weakness of the government, their shallowness, their lack of capacity in administrative skills and their lack of vision for the future of this country mean that they are now being driven by an extreme left-wing green ideology. We know the hypocrisy of that ideology. We know that they will stand up and say and do anything and then do something else behind the scenes. We know that they want to apply different standards to different people. It is like Orwell's Animal Farm, where some animals are more equal than others. Let me tell you that in this place we should all be equal and we should all have one vote. Unfortunately, those on the government side of the chamber have effectively given their votes away to their faceless men and to the faceless women of the Greens party. We know who is driving the government and the agenda. We know that Labor are weak and they are perhaps the worst government in the history of this country.