Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President—with your stern voice! Hypocrisy, thy name is the Australian Labor Party, because what we just heard was a remarkable tirade from Senator Wong, who, for six long years, was a senior cabinet minister and a member of the leadership group in a government that could not lie straight in bed and in a government that systematically broke every clear-cut commitment it seemed to ever make to the Australian people. Way back in the days, a sanctimonious Kevin Rudd, the opposition leader, would stand before the Australian people and pretend to be 'John Howard lite' and plead about how he would run a government of fiscal conservatism that would not be blundering into the debt levels that we had seen from previous Labor governments.

But of course he did not. He didn't, did he? He plundered the debt. He went straight in, as deep as he possibly could, as soon as he possibly could, and we saw him spin about as fast as he possibly could. No longer was he the fiscal conservative. Instead, he was the man writing essays for The Monthly talking about just how we needed to turn around from the capitalist regime and how we needed to turn back to some form of greater government involvement and government spending—and did he spend!

He, of course, was replaced. The Labor Party could not even manage to keep a commitment to the Australian people about who the Prime Minister of the day would be, so they rolled Mr Rudd and put in Ms Gillard just before the 2010 election. She went through that election, and what wonderful words did she have to say? 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'—the infamous words, the words that came to haunt her and haunt the government, the words that she then broke. Pretty much the moment she had been elected at the 2010 election, she struck a deal with the Australian Greens and broke that clear-cut commitment, and off went the government on another flight of fancy.

We could go through Senator Conroy's National Broadband Network, the $4.7 billion NBN that was going to be complete by 2013. Here we are in December 2013, and we discover it was going to actually take more than $70 billion and take until 2024. So much for the word of those opposite.

So it is remarkable that, after just three months of a new government, Senator Wong comes into this chamber, moves a motion and tries to get all preachy about trust and honesty and truthfulness. But I will happily address some of the issues that Senator Wong went through in her comments and try to demonstrate to the chamber how wrong they were but also, importantly, where and how this government is setting about meeting and honouring its commitments.

Senator Wong started on the topic of the car industry. It is a tragedy that yesterday General Motors made the announcement they did. It is a tragedy.