Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by congratulating the Prime Minister on her election. While we will be working as hard as we possibly can to make her term as short as possible, the reality is she has been given the great honour of a being a prime minister of this country, and I am sure that she will treasure this day.

Even in amongst her own celebrations she must be feeling a bit uncomfortable in her stomach about the way in which she got where she is. She is there as Prime Minister today because of the intervention of the New South Wales Labor mafia. If you are relying on the mafia, the faction bosses, the union thugs and the factional warlords to keep you in office, one day they will knock on your door too. One day it will happen to this Prime Minister as well. Just as the New South Wales thugs and factional warlords came across from Sydney to mount a coup in the national capital, one day they will come again and this Prime Minister will face a similar fate.

This is the kind of behaviour you might expect in a Third World dictatorship where people unelected, union bosses and factional thugs, think that they can override the decision of the Australian people, ignore our democratic processes and put in place somebody of their choice to be Prime Minister. These people, still with blood on their hands from the last political execution in New South Wales, came across to do the same thing in the national capital. And their people quickly got behind their factional leaders and knocked on the Prime Minister’s door and within hours he was gone.

Just as a succession of New South Wales premiers are simply there as puppets of the factional leaders, this Prime Minister is simply a puppet of the New South Wales Labor machine. When they are sick of this Prime Minister—when the merry-go-round does another turn—they will be over again to knock on the door and to say, ‘Your time is up.’ Wasn’t it disgraceful to see on television last night the gloating Paul Howes. Who was he? No-one had even heard of him. He was not elected by the Australian people to the parliament. But he was gloating on television about how he was deposing the Prime Minister and he went on about class warfare and the like. He said there was nothing wrong with the way Labor was governing. If that is the case, why was he so determined to get rid of the Prime Minister? In fact, a lot is wrong with Labor in government. Higher electricity and food prices mean real costs to the Australian people. The debt and slashed services will be an additional burden for future generations of Australians. And, of course, the decline in hospitals and health care and other services is simply a national disgrace in a country with the potential of Australia. Labor it is that is now the problem, as it has always been. No matter who the leader is, it is the same lemon: a new face but still bad policy.

The Labor faceless men who wanted the emissions trading scheme and then wanted it dumped now seem to want it back. The only climate that these powerbrokers care about is the political climate and their chances of electoral survival. From day one, the current Prime Minister was part of the kitchen cabinet of four—now down to two—that decided all of the government’s agenda over the past three years. She is just as culpable as the man she deposed for the government’s performance. She is just as much to blame. Indeed, her own portfolio mismanagement has been at the top of the pile of Labor troubles. The reality is that she has wasted more taxpayers’ money in her department—with her BER and all sorts of other programs—than anyone else. If the left-winger Julia Gillard tries to pretend she is an economic conservative, nobody will believe her. If she makes the same promise about how she cares about all Australians, no-one will believe her. I have been trying over the last hour or so to find any connections she has with regional Australia and I cannot find any.

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