Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It is nice to be back with you in the House of Representatives. Since this parliament last sat, the Howard government has had a flood of polling—all of it bad. How do we know that? We read about it every day in the newspaper. It is becoming a new ritual for Australians: you get up in the morning, you get your newspaper, you turn to the back pages for the sporting results, you look on the quiz pages for the solution to yesterday’s crossword, and you turn to the front of the paper and read the Howard government’s polling research. It is happening each and every day for Australians. You would have hoped that the response of a government to those clear messages from the Australian community about how stale it is and how much it has lost touch with the needs of working Australians would have been to get on with the job of governing in the hope of governing well so that it could demonstrate to Australians that it had a vision for the future.

What has been this government’s response? Well, it has been no vision for the future—we know that; no new ideas—we know that; and no pretence of governing well—we know that as well. Instead, this government has lurched for the advertising campaign and it has lurched for the politics of blame. We saw the blame game on display in this parliament throughout question time today. In answer to every question, a government minister or the Prime Minister got up and basically said: ‘It’s someone else’s fault.’ The politics of blame are undoubtedly going to be pursued every day between now and the next election.

What we have also seen in the period that this parliament has been in recess and what we continue to see on our TV screens is this government’s desperate attempt to convince Australians that its extreme Work Choices laws, which have hurt so many Australian families, are actually good for them. These Work Choices advertisements are everywhere you go. They are at saturation coverage on TV. You cannot turn on the TV to watch your favourite program without having these ads. You cannot open up a newspaper without having these ads in your face. You cannot sit in a bus shelter without having these ads beside you. Indeed, they are in local newspapers—so much in local newspapers that, in one edition of my own local newspaper, two separate pages had these advertisements.

The audacity of the government when it comes to these ads not only runs to the blanket coverage but goes to the fact that the theme of them is: ‘Know where you stand’. Well, Minister, sitting at the table there, if you believe that people are entitled to ‘know where they stand’, then I would like some challenges set for you in this MPI, because Australians are entitled to ‘know where they stand’ when they are judging this government at the next election—which we all know, in the ordinary cycle, will be in October. So, Minister, when it comes to telling Australian voters where they stand, we want, today, the following simple questions answered—the things you have covered up, to date; the things you have hidden from Australia. Of course, the trickiness of this government runs deep, and these things have not been exposed in the public domain. The first of them is the cost of this campaign. I was absolutely intrigued when the Prime Minister today jumped up at the dispatch box and said the amount of money that has been spent, to date, on these advertisements is $23 million. Of course he did not tell us how much is going to be spent in total—

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