Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It requires working your way through those facts and policy design. At every stage this Leader of the Opposition gets the big judgment calls wrong.

Let’s just look at the issues confronting the nation this year. On rebuilding Queensland the Leader of the Opposition got the judgment call wrong. He preferred to spread fear in the community rather than put together a package to rebuild Queensland. He does not run that fear campaign any more. He has dropped off that fear campaign but there he was, saying to the people of Queensland that he was quite fond of levies when they were about funding his election commitments but he would not exercise the judgment to support a fairly constructed levy to rebuild Queensland and the rest of the nation. National leadership requires getting the big calls right.

Secondly what happened this year was a national health agreement. We have a health system staggering and suffering because of the actions of the Leader of the Opposition, when he was a long-serving health minister. This Leader of the Opposition, characteristically, with his usual misjudgments, went out and bagged the COAG national health agreement before it was announced. He did not wait to absorb the detail, did not worry about the future for Australian families, did not put his mind to whether or not people would be able to get a doctor in the middle of the night or whether their public hospital would work for them when they needed it; he just went out and criticised, because that is what the Leader of the Opposition does. National leadership requires getting the big calls right.

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