Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I was just noting that we have a Prime Minister who likes to try on different political personas. It is very difficult to know which persona he might be wearing on any given day. He could be the caring Prime Minister, worried about the Howard-Costello years and about how they turned Australia into a brutopia with the economic reforms that were so necessary to get this country moving, or we could have a conservative Prime Minister—that is, a conservative Prime Minister who now believes that the brutopia that 18 months ago he was so worried about actually never went far enough. That is the hairy-chested economic reformer that he has turned himself into. Now he says the coalition years, the years of brutopia, were wasted years and that if he had been in power things would have been different, economic reform would have gone further.

The reality is that what we see from this Prime Minister and his different personas, whether they be caring or economic conservative—and always what you see with this government, of course, is not what they tell you—is that he is more political charlatan than conviction politician. What you see is never what you get with the government. The reality is that we really have a clueless Prime Minister, a Prime Minister who has no strong convictions about how to run an economy, a Prime Minister who has absolutely no strong convictions about how to structure a tax system. And this is why we found the government veering all over the place on economic and tax policy. This is a government that have now taken to preaching about the benefits of competition while they are trying to impose a nationwide system that fines independent retailers for lowering the price of petrol. They are so pro-competition they are going to fine a small business in my electorate for reducing the price of petrol.

This is a government that has now taken to preaching about the virtues of a simplified taxation system, although, in opposition, it opposed all of the necessary tax reform measures that were pursued during the Howard-Costello years. So it preaches the virtues of simplified taxation while it continually takes some ad hoc measures that add complexity and confusion to the system. We have a government that has started to preach that it believes in free markets and lower taxes while it brings down a budget that increases government spending and, for the first time in many years, increases the tax take on hardworking Australians. We have a government that now apparently believes in aspirations. It believes that Australians should work hard to get ahead, while it has measures like this that stoke old-fashioned class envy.

This is the problem when the government is led by a man who has no political convictions, a man who has sat in this place for 10 years and left absolutely not one discernible ideological footprint. This is deeply problematic.

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