Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw my comment—I simply say that before the last election the Prime Minister promised there would be no carbon tax under a government she led, and we have just had guillotined through the Senate 18 bills introducing a carbon tax. Senator McLucas can assess that how she likes, but it does not seem to me to be terribly truthful or terribly honest when you promise not to do something before an election to get yourself elected and, immediately you are elected, you completely break the promise. If it disturbs her when I say the Prime Minister deliberately lied, I withdraw. But, as I say, I will leave it to the listeners to work out what it means when you promise a day before an election that you will not do something and then immediately you get into government you do it.

By the same token, the Australian people were promised with this deal with so-called rural Independents that there would be this whole new paradigm of accountability. Where are we in the Senate? All of these government documents and important responses to reports like this report of the Rural Affairs and Transport References Committee are not being considered. There is no scrutiny because the Greens and the Labor Party have chopped off the opportunity for the Senate to do its job and look at these documents. The carbon tax was guillotined, and for the whole week that was set aside for the carbon tax debate we could not look at government documents and could not look at these reports. Then we had an extra week. We all came back for an extra week, just for the Senate, so that we could debate the carbon tax. After one and a bit days of that week, the government and the Greens again guillotined it. But they did not uplift the ability to hold the government to account on many of these documents. And here the first motion for what is supposed to be the final two weeks of parliament this year is the government saying, 'Again this week we'll do away with any ability for senators to do their duty and look at these government responses.'

You will not get any of the media writing about this because it is a left-wing government doing it, but this should be a headline outrage: taking away from this parliament the ability to do its duty and to follow the 'new paradigm' of accountability. There is no accountability here. The government and the Greens—