Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, Mr Speaker, enjoy this brief moment of praise, because this is a pretty tough place, a place where you do not get praised too often. I make the point that a government which wants to talk about the past is a government that is frightened of the future. I can understand why this Prime Minister does not want to talk about the future. It is because the future under his policy is price rises for everything—price rises that he does not understand and cannot explain. And did we not have a great example of that today in question time. Yesterday he said that electricity prices would rise under his great big new tax by seven per cent and today he was forced to admit that even the government’s own figures show that it would be 18 per cent.

I will now turn to the substance—if substance it be—of the Prime Minister’s statement today. If we are to take the Prime Minister’s statement today at face value, we are to believe that he—the great helmsman; the great magician of the Australian economy; he who is better than Hawke; he who is greater than Keating; he who is greater than Howard and Costello; he, the greatest genius; better than Ben Chifley, better than John Curtin, better than Ted Theodore, the messiah of economic policy—has saved Australia from all the plagues of the apocalypse. This is what this great genius has done. This Prime Minister of ours, assisted slightly by his frontbench, has saved Australia from this terrible disaster.

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