Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Senators Brandis, Cormann and Edwards today.

It was interesting today—and I think it frames it—when Senator Ludwig stated, 'We're committed to a low-carbon economy.' He stated this with all the enthusiasm of a bereaved pensioner at the loss of their dearly loved pet. We slowly see every piece and everything that was formerly a structure of what was the Labor Party's raison d'etre—the reason for them to govern—taken away.

We had the carbon price. First of all, the carbon price started, and Senator Wong was crucial in this, because it was a big thing that the Labor Party Left were fighting for. It started as 'the greatest moral challenge of our time', and then all of a sudden one day we had the famous interview with the Prime Minister. We had had the former Prime Minister, and they dispensed with him and then got themselves a new Prime Minister, Prime Minister Gillard. We had the famous interview on the Brisbane River, where she said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' We all thought that that meant that there would be no carbon tax, so the greatest moral challenge of our time had become not a challenge at all—in fact, not even worth mentioning.

Then we had the thing called the election, at which point in time we thought that she would keep to her promise, but of course she did not; she met the Greens. The Greens trusted her to change her stated position, to change her word and to dispense with her word, and all of a sudden the carbon tax was back on the agenda. Then it was the greatest moral challenge of our time again. In fact, they locked it in and they were never going to change it. It was never, ever going to be amended, changed or affected in any way, shape or form. It was locked in. It was guaranteed. It was cast iron. It was not going anywhere—until last week. Then it started going somewhere. They started removing it. All of a sudden the greatest moral challenge of our time became the greatest moral challenge of our time when you take into account the European scheme. So all of a sudden it is a complete change of position. Of course, that meant all their budgetary figures had completely fallen over, so it was very apt that Senator Wong, who was also supposed to be the finance minister, had completely stepped away from one of the main planks of her forward budget position.

This went hand in glove with the brown coal position. Brown coal used to be this filthy, dirty, naughty, immoral rock. A terrible rock was brown coal. It had to be dispensed with. It had to be removed from the face of the planet. We certainly could not have brown coal generating electricity. It was just out of the ballpark. We just could not have it—until last week. Now brown coal, with the maintaining of Hazelwood, is a noble, righteous, life-giving rock. It has changed position. The moral impediment of brown coal has now changed, because everything changes with the Labor Party. You cannot believe anything—just like Senator Chris Evans's position that the Pacific solution was a disgrace, and now it is a key plank of their immigration policy.

And then we have Senator Penny Wong. She was the climate change minister. Then she was jettisoned from that and became the Minister for Finance and responsible for climate change. Now she is not even that. She does not even want to mention it. She cannot mention the phrase 'climate change' now. Could it be that there is something going on in the Labor left? Could it be maybe a sense that they have no soul—a sense that everything they have been associated with they have basically dispensed with, that they are not prepared to stand by anything anymore because they do not have any ticker? There is nothing there. They are vacuous.

And we have budget honesty. What a joke! Where do we start? Do we start with the first debt ceiling of $75 billion or do we move to the next one, where Treasurer Wayne Maxwell Swan announced in 2008 that they would have a temporary limit of $200 billion? Or do you talk about the time they went straight through that to a permanent extension of a quarter of a trillion dollars? Or do we talk about the latest manifestation: the $300 billion debt ceiling. Or do we talk about the fact that they said they would never go near the quarter-trillion limit but now in questions on notice it has come back that they go right up to it? There is nothing. Now do we talk about the $120 billion black hole?

It does not matter how many tosses and turns they have; the one thing they cannot lie about—the one thing they cannot change—is the absolute paucity of economic credentials and the massive debt that this crowd has got us into.