Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

so he says—but does not understand community needs. And, if it is all truly examined, it does not understand the principles of business either because he cancelled a plan without having a plan to replace it. He cancelled a plan that would have rolled out wireless infrastructure to regional and rural Australia for less than $1 billion under the OPEL contract to pursue a $55 billion flight of fantasy. He is a minister who to date has delivered nothing to those communities four years on. And they suffer the tyranny of distance; they suffer communication blackholes. What we want to see is action.

The issue with this government is the fact that they are not businesspeople; they are not business managers. They have never had true skin in the game. They do not understand risk. They do not understand that when you spend a dollar you need to make a return on that dollar. What we have here is a government who are just prepared to fritter away money and, when times get tough, all they do is revert back to the old Labor mantra—which was reflected in the times of Keating and Hawke and that icon of the Labor Party, Gough Whitlam: let’s just tax. As Tony Abbott said so eloquently this morning in the House, Julia Gillard has never met a tax she did not like or a tax she was not prepared to hike.

See this speech in context