Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012. When talking about the overall economic performance of the Gillard government there are three issues that come top of mind. The first one is the issue of trust and credibility—the issue of the truth. The second one is waste—and we have seen a lot of waste. The third one is the carbon tax and what it is going to do to the already increasing cost of living being felt in communities across the country.

Trust in government is vital and trust in the Prime Minister is vital. Yet sadly what we are seeing day by day is that our Prime Minister cannot be trusted. We saw it with the promise that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led, which was made before the last election and then was immediately disavowed after the election. We have seen it rear its ugly head with what happened on Australia Day. As 7.30 highlighted last night, we now once again cannot believe the version of events that we are getting from the Prime Minister on this issue. We have seen it with the private health insurance bills, the commitments that were made before the 2007 election and what was done immediately after to renege on those commitments.

Trust in government is very important for overall economic health. If you cannot trust what the Prime Minister and the government are saying then the overall sovereign risk increases. We now have companies, small businesses and individuals—farmers and manufacturers; people in all sectors of our economy—unable to believe what this government tells them. That means that the investment decisions that they would like to make are being put off, because they do not know whether this government will go back on its word and make a decision that will harm that long-term investment if they go forward with those investment decisions.

The best thing that we can do to improve sovereign risk in this country is to go to an election. People are fed up with their being told one thing and then the government doing another. It has got to the stage where lack of trust is eroding people's confidence in this government. It is time for the government to recognise this and to realise that it is damaging the nation and increasing sovereign risk, meaning that investment in all sectors across the country is being curtailed. No-one has the confidence to believe what the government is saying, even when it is looking them in the eye. They are worried that it will do something else. That is sad.

This was personified in the Prime Minister's appearance on Four Corners. I do not think that we have ever seen anything shiftier in political history in Australia than her answers to the two questions that were put to her about whether she had seen the polling that was being handed around to destabilise Kevin Rudd and whether a speech was being prepared in her office two weeks before Kevin Rudd was rolled. If you cannot have confidence in the words of the Prime Minister, it harms in every way people's ability to look and say, 'Okay, what is the level of sovereign risk in this country?' Australia has always been seen as a safe place to put investment.

I now turn to the question of waste. You have all seen today just another example of how this government treats the taxpayer with utter contempt. On the front page of today's Australianwe have the $700 Labor Party set-top box. We then have the $19 set-top box, which you can get down at your local discount store. The $19 set-top box versus the $700 Labor set-top box. On the front page of the Australianis pictured one of my constituents, who made this very valid comment which I think stands true for a lot of the spending problems this government has. She said:

I think their idea might have been well intended, but you wonder if they thought it through.

I will just repeat that, because I am hoping that the Labor members who are here today might just take this into account the next time they think of one of their wonderful ideas: 'I think their idea might have been well intended, but you wonder if they thought it through.' That is the $700 Labor set-top box versus the $19 set-top box that you can get from your local discount store. It is gross waste.

Let us turn to the BER. Once again it would be fair to say that the idea might have been well intended, but you wonder if they thought it through. Sadly, they did not. I have seen in my electorate example after example of waste and more waste. There is a little school, which I will not name because the school is still dealing with the BER issue, in one of the areas of socioeconomic disadvantage in my electorate. There is a school principal who is doing outstanding work in trying to educate those students. They had a roof which needed replacing because it was leaking. An amount of $1.2 million was spent on giving the school a new roof. The first time that it rained, the principal had to get up with a hammer because the rain was pouring so badly into one of the classrooms. She had to get up on a ladder herself and get a hammer and fix a hole in the roof to make sure that damage was not done to all the inside carpet and from rain running down the walls and ripping all the paint off the walls. So it was $1.2 million to fix the problem and the problem was made worse.

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