Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. Standing orders should be suspended and the Prime Minister given 10 minutes to come into the House and apologise to the people of Australia. If she does not and if the Labor Party does not support this motion then they will be confirming that we have the most brazen Prime Minister in Australia's history. This Prime Minister brazenly said before the last election, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' Having been elected, she brazenly broke that promise in order to grasp at power to get the Greens to support the Labor Party to be in government. She then brazenly said at the time that she was doing just what John Howard had done with the goods and services tax. She brazenly forgot in fact that John Howard took the GST to an election and got a mandate from the Australian people to introduce the goods and services tax. At the time she broke her promise not to introduce a carbon tax, she brazenly said that it was not a tax. It took Laurie Oakes to tease out of her finally, for her finally to admit, that it was in fact what everyone knew it to be—a carbon tax and another broken promise.

She brazenly said in question time yesterday that the whole point of the carbon tax was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when in fact she had said on 22 February last year:

I want to be very clear with Australians about what pricing carbon does: it has price impacts. It is meant to. That is the whole point.

So in February last year she was telling the truth about the carbon tax—a nice change. She was at least telling the Australian people that the whole point of the carbon tax was to increase their electricity prices. And aren't we seeing that happen? Brazenly yesterday in question time she said that it was about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every day in question time, she uses sophistry of the English language to avoid answering specific questions and she did so again today when asked whether she supported increasing or decreasing electricity prices and whether that was the purpose of the carbon tax.

In fact, even the assertion that the whole point of the carbon tax is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not true, because by 2020 on the government's own modelling greenhouse gas emissions will increase by eight per cent. She also brazenly says that households will be compensated—that nine out of 10 households will be compensated. What she does not tell people is that three million households in Australia will be worse off. Three million Australian families will struggle even more under cost-of-living pressures than they already are—on the government's own modelling, on the government's own figures.

Worst of all, she says brazenly to the Australian people that if the coalition wins the next election Labor will reject our attempt to repeal the carbon tax. She has already locked the Labor Party in to ignoring the will of the Australian people. The next election will be a referendum on the carbon tax and, if the coalition should be fortunate enough to win it, we will immediately introduce legislation to repeal it and the House will sit until it is done. Yet, the Prime Minister has already ruled out the possibility that Labor will listen to the will of the Australian people. This Prime Minister, leading Labor as she is, is leading a group of Labor MPs who are like docile sheep. Standing orders should be suspended, because the docile sheep of the parliamentary Labor Party are being led by this Prime Minister into the slaughterhouse, abattoir and charnel house that will be the next federal election if they seriously take to the next election this Prime Minister who cannot be trusted and the policy to stop our repeal of the carbon tax.

The Australian people simply will not tolerate it. It is time that the parliamentary Labor Party recognised the extraordinary damage that this Prime Minister is doing to the Labor Party brand and the Labor Party tradition and woke up to the fact that none of you can believe anything she says. The Australian people know it. The Australian people have stopped listening. It is time that the Labor Party did the right thing and put the interests of the Australian people first and not the interests of this unworthy Prime Minister.

On the second anniversary of the Prime Minister's great lie—

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