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

On the day that the Prime Minister completed her leadership coup, she said that the Labor government had lost its way. Six months later, they are still lost. They are still inside the same empty paper bag trying to find a way out. They are absolutely lost. There was once a TV series called Lost. It went on for years, seemingly an endless saga. As the only Australian member of parliament to have been mentioned in that program, I think that I have a right to speak with some authority on this subject today. We have seen the TV show; now we have the government: lost. Nothing better describes this government than the word ‘lost’. It lost its way and it has no idea how to find a solution.

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The Prime Minister made the blunt and very factual admission that the Labor administration lost its way sometime between 2007 and 2010. In fact, I am not sure that it ever found its way at the beginning, but certainly it had lost its way by the time the Prime Minister made the great confession. Now, after another four or five months of searching since she became the leader and made that statement, Labor still has not found what it is looking for. It still has no idea where it is going. I am not even sure that Labor knows what it is looking for. It is a poll driven party that knows how to stay in office, even if it has to hand away all the power to its masters in the Greens. It stays in office, and that is all that Labor is about—never about delivering any kind of vision or making any of the good policy decisions that need to be made. There is never anything in the national interest, there is no direction, there is no vision, there is no commitment, there are no core values and there is no plan. The government is completely lost. There is no mojo. There is no soul. This is a party that is lost and that knows not where to go. This is not governing. This is, in fact, struggling around to find a path out—except the government wants to maintain the trappings of office.

This is also a government that, sadly, is not honest. It was not honest with the Australian people before the last election. The Rudd government was infamous for its long list of broken promises, but Labor has not learnt. This government is also about broken promises, with no regard for the commitments it made to the Australian people before the election. If there was one statement that the Prime Minister handed out—repeatedly said, in plain, simple language—it was that there would be no carbon tax while she was Prime Minister. She also said that there would be no emissions tax while she was Prime Minister, under her government. There would be no carbon tax. But since the election they can talk about practically nothing else. The previous speaker, the member for Cunningham, spoke almost entirely about an emissions trading scheme and about a carbon tax. Does she not believe what her leader said just before the election—that there was not going to be a carbon tax? Why is anyone on the opposite side even talking about it? The Prime Minister said that there will not be a carbon tax.

All questions from the government today, in their dorothy dixers, were about the carbon tax that Labor promised they were not going to have—that they promised they were not going to deliver. Does this government have any honesty, any credibility or any decency at all? The reality is that they made empty promises to try to beguile the Australian people, when in reality there was always this agenda. There was no concern for real people, no concern about the impacts of what Labor was actually going to deliver through its carbon tax. They said there would be no carbon tax, but now it is their priority issue and they can talk about little else. It has taken only days for the government to break their core election promise. They told the pensioners, they told the small business people and they told the employers of Australia, ‘We will not impose a carbon tax on you while Julia Gillard is Prime Minister.’ Yet now the government can talk and think about nothing else.

There was going to be a 150-member committee to devise a new climate change policy, with one member chosen from every electorate—from the phone book or some other way. Then there was going to be a committee of parliamentarians, but only those people who were for a carbon tax could actually be on it—a carbon tax that they were not even going to have. So why, indeed, have the committee? Now we are going to have PC committee reports and all sorts of other things. This is a government that cannot be trusted, because it cannot be taken at its word.

The Prime Minister said in question time today that she wants a truthful debate about a carbon tax. How can she ask for a truthful debate on a carbon tax when she has not been truthful? She promised that there would be no carbon tax, and now we hear little more from the government than about how they are going to implement it, in what way and how expensive it is going to be for Australian people. This is a government that surely has failed. In fact, the Prime Minister herself said, on 18 September, that she could not honour all her election promises because of a changed environment. She was publicly walking away from the promises she had made only a few days earlier.

This government has particularly failed in managing the economy, and that matters for the Australian people because we have to pick up the costs. It is hard work. It is something that the previous government did well and received a lot of credit for. We inherited, when we came to government last time, what seemed to be an incredible and almost insurmountable debt of $93 billion and record budget deficits, with no plan in sight to enable us to repay that debt. But we worked on it, and we delivered. We delivered budget surpluses, we delivered good economic times and we delivered interest rates which were, on average, lower than those that this Labor government has delivered since it has been in office. Indeed, Labor has only one policy proposal. As the Leader of the Opposition said, their economic strategy is to borrow, waste and tax. That is the way Labor behaved in government the previous time they were in office, and they are going down the same path again: borrow, waste and tax.

The Australian people are looking for something better than that. They want a sense of direction. I welcome the fact that a few courageous figures within the Labor movement are beginning to speak out. Senator Doug Cameron, a stalwart of the Left, branded his fellow MPs as zombies—people who would not speak out. There were a number of regional MPs who would not speak out on behalf of their electorates during the last election, and they are not here today. We have the member for Dawson and the member for Flynn in the parliament because the previous members for those electorates would not speak out against the evils of Labor’s emissions trading scheme, and their electorates passed judgment upon them. The reality is that we do not want people who will just sit like zombies, not prepared to make any contribution to the policy debate. Frankly, the people on the back bench could not possibly be any worse than those on the front when it comes to actually delivering policies and actually delivering results.

Paul Howes was another to speak his mind, when he said Labor’s election losses resulted from an ‘unwillingness to provide real leadership’. There is no willingness, there is no ability, because this government is simply lost; it is paralysed. The only thing it is good at is spending money. The month of September saw our deficit grow to $13.8 billion, the highest monthly blow-out on record. During the election campaign we used to talk of Labor borrowing $100 million a day. In September our government had to borrow $400 million every day, to pay for the excess of its expenditure over what it was raising. So if you were in small business and you wanted to borrow some money from the banks during September to keep your business afloat you were competing with a government that wanted $400 million on that same day so that it could keep afloat. And the government wanted another $400 million the next day. So if you were a homeowner and went into the bank the next day, you also had to compete against a government that needed $400 million just to stay afloat. Is it any wonder that interest rates are going up? Is it any wonder that the banks complain about their cost of borrowing going up? The government is out of control—its waste, borrowing and taxing policy is what is driving up interest rates and placing an enormous burden on ordinary Australians.

We need some people who will stand up, who will make decisions, and we need people who understand what is going on in our country. We need some people who care about the livelihoods of families, and you will not find those in Labor. This government has sunk to a new level. It is truly lost. (Time expired)

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