Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not believe them. I appreciate that prompt from my colleague. We cannot believe anything they say because the reality is that they are there to support their friends in big business. They are happy for companies that are polluting to get away with doing that for free. That is really what a carbon price is to for. Just as I have to pay to put my garbage in the bin and put it in the front yard to be taken away, the carbon price is about making the people who pollute—the limited numbers of big businesses who pollute excessively in our environment—pay for what they are doing.

In responding to the pressure of big business, the new Liberal-National Party coalition have decided that they are going to be the friends of big business. They are not friends of small business. When the government talk about businesses benefiting they do not realise that small businesses in the community are where the Schoolkids Bonus will be spent and which will be advantaged by that. There is the small business, for example, of Payless Shoes at Woy Woy, near where I live, where schoolchildren have been getting their shoes. With a little pressure off family budgets, people might be able to go and have a coffee in such small businesses, and keep that small business alive.

People who are starting up small businesses are never flush with cash. They have lost their instant asset write-off under these supposed friends of small business—those sitting on the opposite side of the chamber, who are really crying crocodile tears but doing nothing to put money into the pockets of ordinary Australians who are genuinely doing it tough in terms of managing their family budgets.

This government's unseemly assault of the national broadcaster is another example of the way in which they are ignoring the reality of being a government that has a vision for the country. Our national broadcaster, the ABC, dared to raise serious allegations but that was swiftly followed by the launch of an efficiency review by those opposite, as well as plans to cut the ABC's budget by almost a quarter of a billion dollars. These are all the sneaky things that they are doing. They are pretending that they are friends of the ordinary Australian. They are pretending that they are friends of small business. They are pretending that they are friends of the Australian population while cutting and slashing away.

Such actions are clumsy attempts to bully and cajole our national broadcaster into meek compliance. This, coupled with Mr Abbott's and Mr Morrison's hiding behind the navy and claiming war-time censorship to justify their secretive contempt of the Australian public, clearly shows that this is a government addicted to secrecy—