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

campaigning and complaining about a few nasty placards. I’ll tell you what: we never heard any complaints from former Prime Minister John Howard when people like the minister for climate change and the Assistant Treasurer fronted rallies, before placards, calling the Prime Minister ‘Satan’ and ‘Hitler’ and ‘baby killer’. This is the kind of thing that the former Prime Minister had to put up with, and members opposite did not utter the slightest word of an apology or show the slightest sign of embarrassment. This is the preciousness of a Prime Minister who thinks that anyone who does not agree with her is an extremist. She thinks all of the people who were good enough to turn up outside of this parliament building, yesterday, were somehow extremists—everyone except the member for Robertson, who was there with them. The trouble with the extremists, as she sees them, is that they include the Chairman of BlueScope Steel, who is not only the Chairman of BlueScope Steel but also is so extreme that he is on the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia. She says that everyone who does not agree with her is extreme but she so forgets herself that she cannot remember that one of the extremes is the extreme she relies on to stay in government. This is a measure of the dishonesty, the mendacity and the hypocrisy of this Prime Minister. Why shouldn’t the Australian people be angry with this Prime Minister who won office based on a lie?

Why shouldn’t they be angry with a Prime Minister who said there would be no carbon tax? Now she says there will be a carbon tax, a carbon tax that will put $300 a year on your power bill, just for starters, a carbon tax that would put 6½c a litre on your petrol bill, just for starters, a carbon tax that will put $6,240 on the price of a new home, just for starters, a carbon tax that will cost 126,000 jobs in regional Australia, just for starters, and a carbon tax that will close down the steel industry, the aluminium industry and the motor industry, just for starters. I say to this Prime Minister: if she really is a person of conviction, if she really does believe that this carbon tax that she once said would never happen must happen—if she really believes this—why doesn’t she have the guts to face the people? Why doesn’t she have the guts to seek a mandate on her carbon tax and then accept the judgment of the Australian people? (Time expired)

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