Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The reality is that the ALP are tired of losing, and that is why they are bringing forward this grab bag of hypocritical criticism of the government’s advertising campaign in an attempt to justify their flip-flop approach to industrial relations, which was outlined so eloquently by the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations just a short time ago. The minister referred to a whole series of policy announcements and policy reversals in the area of industrial relations. He referred to those in the area of arbitration. He talked about the happiness test. He talked about foreign shipping permits, the one-stop shop, minimum pay, the 24-month leave, pattern bargaining and the bargaining fee. While he outlined the details of those backflips the simple fact of the matter is that one hand in the ALP simply does not know what the other hand in the ALP is seeking to achieve in the area of industrial relations. It goes further than that, because this policy inconsistency goes right across the length and breadth of opposition policy.

Australians are a pretty fair people—a fairly reasonable nation. Australians the length and breadth of our continent understand when the government is doing the right thing, and they absolutely despise hypocrisy such as we see today from the Australian Labor Party. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition referred to the government’s advertising campaign to inform people of changes to Australian law and she kept saying that the government was wasting money. She equated informing the Australian people with wasting money. She forgets that when the Labor Party was in office the Keating government spent large amounts of government funding in a way that was, in fact, political advertising—unlike what this government is doing. We are seeking to inform the Australian people of important changes to the law of Australia.

As a Parliamentary Library research note says:

... government advertising has an important democratic function. The public has a right to be informed about the programs .... their taxes fund. Equally, governments have a right to establish a framework for delivering this information ...

When in office the ALP did as they did, but when we are in office and informing the Australian people about very substantial, important, fundamental, necessary and positive changes to industrial relations we get criticised. Of course, if we had not had an advertising campaign to tell the Australian people about these changes we would have been condemned for keeping the Australian people in the dark. It is absolutely ridiculous that the ALP, on the one hand, claim what they did in office to be correct and, on the other hand, seem to find what we are attempting to do—and what we are doing is not what they did—in informing the Australian people about changes to the law to be somehow unacceptable.

Let us look at what the Keating government did. The bulk of the Keating government’s $3 million advertising campaign on Medicare hospital entitlements was spent in the month before the 1993 poll. The Keating government spent $9 million in the three months prior to the 1996 federal election. When one looks at what the ALP government has done in a purely party political way and compares it with our sensible, rational public information campaign, the Australian people can see that the Australian Labor Party is being totally hypocritical and totally unacceptable.

See this speech in context