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

From the Leader of the National Party what we see is a continuation of the campaign of deceit that the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency was just exposing to this parliament—a campaign of falsehoods and misrepresentations, a campaign designed to put fear into Australians, a campaign that every step of the way neglects the facts, including bringing into the parliament yesterday an electricity bill no-one in the opposition had bothered to read, which on its face clearly supported what the government has been saying about the increase in electricity pricing caused by carbon.

Mr Pyne interjecting—

I know the member for Sturt does not want people to have the facts, but these are the facts. What the Leader of the National Party has just done in pursuit of misleading Australians is he has tried to combine electricity price rises from different sources and pretend that they are all about carbon. That is wholly untrue. That is a misrepresentation. That is an attempt to mislead. What the Leader of the National Party actually knows is that the impact on electricity prices is 10 per cent—$3.30 a week on average, when, on average, households have received assistance of $10.10 a week. Yes, there have been shocking increases in electricity that come from other sources and are the responsibility, in part, of policy settings of state governments—something about which the Leader of the National Party, to my knowledge, has never said anything, because instead he prefers to engage in this campaign of misleading.

Australians do face cost-of-living pressures. There is no doubt about that. So the government has worked with Australians on those cost-of-living pressures, and we will continue to do so. That has included providing tax cuts, including making sure that people can earn $18,200 a year without paying a cent of tax. It has included family payment increases, including the package of sharing the benefits from the boom, opposed by those opposite. It has included the schoolkids bonus, which, to a person, everybody opposite marched in and voted against. It has included putting more money into child care, which of course is there to support families with their cost-of-living pressures.

There is one opposition member who is prepared to tell the truth about these things—that is, Mal Washer, who has said:

We beat the drum too hard on the carbon tax—everyone has stopped listening to the sound of it. The marrow has gone out of it—we need to move on to other issues.

I suggest to the Leader of the National Party that he talk to Mal Washer about telling the truth. (Time expired)

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