Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

No. Obviously there was no policy. There was no comment at all about other significant matters. There was no policy contribution about alternative fuels, no policy contribution about jobs growth, no positive contribution about anything.

He also talked about government advertising. The last year that the Labor Party was in power, in real terms, the amount of money it spent on advertising was more than this government spent in 2002 and 2003. The government does need to spend money on advertising. About $25,000 a year goes solely on defence recruitment. Another $20,000 to $25,000 goes on advisory ads, recruitments and notices for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Electoral Commission and other government bodies. The government also runs campaigns against smoking, alcoholism and the use of illegal drugs. It also urges employers to support apprenticeships and gets people to help environmental projects. That is the majority of government advertising.

Since today is the day that the government held its very important and historic history summit, let us remember a bit of Labor advertising history. Remember the $250,000 they paid Bill Hunter for government advertising? And what did we see? The same Bill Hunter turned up in Labor’s 1996 election commercials. That is just a bit of the smell of the hypocrisy from the Labor Party.

The member for Grayndler talked about the national interest. I have some advice for him—though he may choose not to take it. There is one thing that the Labor opposition can do in the national interest, and that is to be a decent opposition. Any democracy in the Western world demands and deserves an opposition that is hard working, an opposition that is full of members who are representative of the nation they seek to represent, an opposition—

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