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

Breaking promises is simply the Labor way. They believe promises are made to be broken. The entire record of the previous government was a litany of broken promises and this government is obviously going to be no better. Some of you may remember the promises from the previous government. Remember former Prime Minister Rudd looking television cameras in the eye on paid Labor Party advertisements and saying, ‘I am an economic conservative. I am committed to balancing the budget.’ That was before the election before last. He did not deliver a single balanced budget. Indeed, he delivered record budget deficits every time—record deficits, never balanced the budget, a broken promise to be an economic conservative.

What about Labor’s broadband promises? We have heard something about it from the Deputy Prime Minister, who is leaving the chamber. Labor promised before the 2007 election to deliver fibre-to-the-node broadband at 100 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australia’s population beginning from Christmas 2008 at a cost of $4.7 billion. Now the cost is $43 billion. Hardly anybody has got it three Christmases later and, of course, two million Australians—mainly in regional Australia—have been left out of the promise altogether. Labor axed the OPEL contract, which would have been delivering high-speed broadband to most of Australia by now, and now it has got some fairy-land proposal without a business plan—another broken promise. If regional Australians ever get any of this broadband, some time about 2018, they are only going to get the same wireless that was committed under the OPEL contract—a broken Labor promise.

Remember Kevin Rudd’s famous statement: ‘Labor’s policy is that if people are intercepted on the high seas then the vessel should be turned around.’ That was Kevin Rudd’s commitment to the Australian people before he was elected as Prime Minister.

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