Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

at that time said:

… the Labor Party is the party of truth telling. When we go out into the electorate and make promises, do you know what we would do in government: we would keep them. When we say them, we mean them.

I thought, 'Hang on! Is this the same member that is now the Prime Minister, that went to the last election promising to have no carbon tax under the government she leads?' I thought, 'The delusion continues,' because on 20 March 2009 our now Prime Minister said:

I think when you go to an election and you give a promise to the Australian people, you should do everything in your power to honour that promise. We are determined to do that. We gave our word to the Australian people in the election and this is a Government that prides itself on delivering election promises. We want Australians to be able to say well, they’ve said this and they did this …

These are the Prime Minister's own words. This is why the Prime Minister's integrity is in tatters. This is why there is no trust between the Australian people and their Prime Minister. This is why the Australian people have switched off. They have switched off on the Prime Minister, the leader of the nation, because they no longer trust the person in the job.

Trust is a two-way street. Politicians go to the election and they ask the Australian people to trust them with the responsibility of properly running the country and to honour their promises. The flip side is that the politicians have to trust the Australian people, so much so that words are bullets in this game. As has been said before, there are three things in life that can never be recovered: the spoken word, the spent arrow and the lost opportunity. And on this day of all days—the first anniversary of when the Prime Minister spoke the words, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'—she cannot recover those words. They are spoken forever. And the bullets and arrows that follow are spent forever.

The fact is that there will be no further opportunities for this Prime Minister. There will be no further opportunities for this government because it is a government that has fundamentally undermined the trust of the Australian people in its judgment, its integrity, its honesty, its consistency and its credibility. This is a government that is inconsistent. That is why consumer confidence is down. That is why people are not going out and borrowing money and taking risks. They are afraid that if they take risks in their daily lives the government will come along and either regulate it or tax it, because that is what Labor does. Labor regulates and taxes. Labor wants to control your life. It wants to be intimately involved in your decision making.

The coalition believes in an Australia where people take personal responsibility for their actions. We believe in a nation where people control their destiny; the government does not—the government facilitates their destiny. That is what we believe in. That is what drives us. The government is clinging onto fictional numbers out of a report in the media, fictional numbers about a so-called black hole. Let me tell you this: we make no apology for going after government waste. We make no apology for having smaller government under the coalition. We will not tax Australians as much as Labor and we will not spend as much as Australia has to spend under Labor. Under the Labor Party it is big tax, big spend. We will not have a $26 billion carbon tax and we will not spend $30.2 billion on the other side of the equation. Somehow this mob think in government that Australians are better off when you take $26 billion of a carbon tax off them and give them back $16 billion in compensation. You know what? You only offer compensation if you cause injury. You only offer compensation if people are hurt. Even Ross Garnaut—Saint Ross himself: the person the Labor Party believe is truly the oracle on this matter—has said every single Australian household is going to end up paying this tax. You can tax business, but business is going to pass it through. And, of course, they do not even know how many businesses. Old Swannie comes in here—we love Swannie—

See this speech in context