Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions without notice asked by Senators Wong and Dastyari today relating to negative gearing and to the Safe Schools program.

What an incredible time to be alive! What an exciting time to be alive! We had the Assistant Treasurer this morning appear on the Sunrise program. Boy, what a performance that was! With this government, you get it all. Property prices are apparently going to both go up and go down as part of the government's new scare campaign about Labor's negative gearing policy. It is bring your own scare campaign day at the Australian parliament. Anything goes. Any plan goes. Any fear goes. Any scaremongering will work. At the same time, simultaneously, we are going to have a policy that is going to both make houses unaffordable and make everyone poorer by reducing the value of their home.

Frankly, if you want to run a scare campaign—I do not know if I should be telling the government how to do this—pick a side. Make one decision. Clearly the Assistant Treasurer was not at the meeting at the Liberal Party head office when they decided which scare campaign they were going to run, or she had an earlier memo. But you have to pick a side. You have to pick one scare campaign and just stick with it.

I have to say I was wrong about the Prime Minister. I have been wrong about Mr Turnbull. I thought Mr Turnbull was this brilliant Bond villain and was going to be some kind of evil genius. It turns out the Prime Minister is Dr Evil. We all thought he was this genius with this secret plan. It turns out the Prime Minister has no idea what he is doing and that he is just making it up as he goes along.

The fact is that Australians already have spent a long time watching a group of out-of-town, born-to-rule types lounge around without any real idea of what they are doing next. At least Downton Abbey had a plotline. This government does not even have a plotline. It does not have an agenda. It does not have a point. What you have is a government running around in circles. There is no policy. There is no initiative. There is only a handful of tactics, and even the tactics are not very good. It is a scare campaign a week. It is bring your own scare campaign day. It is a government that is already falling apart at the seams, and its internals are ripping it apart.

You have seen the chaos where you have the education minister and the VET minister talk about this fantastic program, the Safe Schools Coalition, and then you turn around and you have the Prime Minister getting browbeaten by Senator Bernardi into starting to abandon it. It is chaos. It is madness. It is government in disarray. This is a government that is more chaotic than Kanye West's Twitter feed. This government has descended into an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It is a bunch of super-rich people—all of whom, I may add, seem to think they are more attractive than they actually are—sitting around doing nothing and pretending that somehow that is a real job. It is not. They have a responsibility. They are not meeting it. The only thing we need to top off the insanity that has become this government is Scott Morrison tweeting Mark Zuckerberg and asking for a billion dollars so that he can produce a budget. It has gone mad. It has gone crazy. This government has started to all apart.

Frankly, when you have a good policy proposal and you put up a good idea, a big idea, like the idea around negative gearing, what you get is a scare campaign. Let's be clear. What is going on here is that this is a desperate government. It is a lost government. It is a hopeless government, and it does not actually have a solution to what is going on in the housing market. A Saturday morning in Sydney is like The Hunger Games. A bunch of young families are going out there, battling each other, trying to get into the housing market and buy their first home, and it is becoming harder and harder for them to do that. And why is it harder? Because you have government incentives that are about the investors. An investor getting their seventh property should not have more incentives or financial benefits to do it than someone trying to buy their first home. You have the Prime Minister sitting in the Capitol like President Snow in The Hunger Games, just saying: 'Oh, all hell will break loose. There will be havoc. There will be madness if we address some of these problems.' It is a joke. It is a fraud. This government is falling apart. (Time expired)