Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am in fact talking about accountability. Accountability is fundamental to our system. The Prime Minister went to the election saying he was going to be better than everybody else. He was going to have higher transparency and higher accountability. But what we are getting is less accountability and less transparency, and we are seeing self-interest playing a major part as always.

We are debating the question of accountability in the context of what is in the Sydney papers today, and that is the utter corruption of the Labor Party and the New South Wales government. We are seeing this in the context of corruption, sex, bribery, ICAC and jobs for the boys—all the usual Labor Party practices that we got used to in previous governments. We heard from the Prime Minister today that he was going to be above this—that he was going to be better than them. What do we get? We get no transparency and, of course, we get the truncated sittings of the parliament. We get the Clayton’s Friday.

I can make this speech today knowing that the privilege of parliament will apply and that those people who might want to report on it will be covered by that privilege as well. If I had made this speech tomorrow, there may be no such privilege. Indeed, by curtailing what can be said in the parliament, you are curtailing the amount of accountability the government is prepared to present itself to face up to. The fact of the matter is that, when we come in here tomorrow, we can perhaps make speeches as benign and useless as the Minister for Trade made in 19½ minutes. He told us in 19½ minutes that he was going to establish another inquiry.

What should be happening tomorrow, as we have said, is that there should be a question time and there should be quorums called, established and verified. I would be most interested to hear the Chief Government Whip’s opinion on what happens when a quorum is called and the chair says, ‘I can’t hear you.’ Having had it drawn to their attention that there is no quorum, are we then disbanded—are we then in breach of the Constitution? We will see, won’t we? It is one of those policies that can best be called ‘the streaker’s defence’—it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The fact is that we are now seeing a parliament where, because of the filibuster technique—and I guess we can expect to see that every Thursday—proper matters of public importance will not be able to be debated. I go back to what I said right at the beginning. This important point of accountability is fundamental to our Westminster system. We have a Prime Minister who says that he is going to be better—better, certainly, than what is happening in New South Wales. But the Labor Party, together with its trade union movement, is now worth $1 billion, and there is no way in the world that that amount of money can be accumulated by any other political party.

Once again, on all 10 points that I have rated today, the Prime Minister has failed. He gets nought out of 10 on every issue that he promised he would deliver on. His first 100 days were going to be magnificent. They have about two days to go, I think, and the fact of the matter is that they have failed on every promise that was made—on the fundamental promises. The people believed that the government, by being elected, would bring down interest rates, bring down grocery prices, bring down petrol prices and provide relief for child care—all the things that matter to working families. In fact, the real policy that you are pursuing in your fight against inflation is to make working families welfare families. The unemployment pool is the only tool you have in your toolbox to fight the inflation about which you complain.

We discussed the NAIRU, didn’t we? The Treasurer, Mr Swan, did not know what that was. In fact, it was through the Howard government’s structural reforms to our economy that that came down. On the figures admitted to by Treasury, it came down from seven per cent, to 5.1 per cent and then to 4.7 per cent. With more reforms of the sort that we had planned, we could have gone past the 4.1 per cent at which unemployment rests today.

But your argument in favour of fighting inflation first means your only tool is to make working families, for whom you said you were concerned on all those other counts, welfare families. No wonder inflation was at an all-time low 16 years ago: we were coming off the back of the Paul Keating engineered recession. One million unemployed—you bet it forced inflation down! And you can copy it again. With a million unemployed again, you will have low inflation.

Debate interrupted.

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