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

In the few very short minutes that I have, I want to reflect on the MPI and the proposition that in fact the government has failed in policy and leadership in respect of Australia's forgotten families.

Mr Speaker, as you know, in this place debate can be robust. In this place there is a contest of ideas but there is also a contest of values, and that is just as important as the contest of policy and ideas. The contest of values is based on the fact that the people who stand at this dispatch box and promulgate a view are in fact also the leaders of the nation. They are the people who are expected to set the benchmark for behaviour, for honesty, for integrity and for the enunciation of good principles.

What has been most disappointing to me this week is that the values of the Prime Minister and the government should have been so absent. They have been missing, and the great fallout from that behaviour is in fact Australia's forgotten families. Whether it be through the loss of jobs or, consistently, the loss of confidence, the loss of opportunity or the removal of reward for risk through higher taxes and more regulation, this is a government that is now consistently denying the best interests of the Australian people and focusing only on its own interest—that is, the protection of its power in this place.

Its own base is now walking away from it. For a major Australian union to walk away from the Labor Party as it did this week—for proper and fully understood reasons—is a significant event, because union leaders are putting the interests of their members—the working poor—ahead of the interests of Julia Gillard. If the Prime Minister does not realise that, by being bereft of values and principles, she is now reflecting poorly on the unions and the working poor then she, sadly, misunderstands her own country.

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