Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Give the member for Wakefield some leniency in this matter. I can understand he is under extraordinary stress. Why wouldn't you be when you think you have got a seat for life and then your Prime Minister trashes the Labor brand and you see thousands of manufacturing jobs disappear around the country and in your own state? Of course you would be beside yourself. Of course you would sit there interjecting when someone tries to point out the facts of what has happened under this government.

When this government leaves office, it will leave behind an atrocious situation in the sector for its successor to have to try and fix. Sadly, this government has no vision and no clear or sensible priorities. All it has is an insatiable desire to spend and to delay the difficult decisions. It has an incapacity to make the hard decisions. In fact, the only thing it truly knows how to do in the industry and innovation portfolio is to mislead, spin, increase bureaucracy and suffocate Australian businesses with ever more insidious regulatory requirements and costs and the world's biggest carbon tax. This government has a tin ear.

Australian businesses, Australian manufacturers, deserve so much more. To that end, the coalition is disappointed but not surprised that the government is introducing this bill and again ignoring common sense and sound and sensible advice from the business community in the process. The government is very good at cute and clever Orwellian language, but the Australian people have heard enough and they have seen through the veneer of this government. There is nothing there but spin. There is nothing there but sheer desperation to survive.

This Prime Minister has sold out working people to appease the Greens. Her judgement was so poor that she thought she needed to sell out working people and Australian families—sell out working people who work in manufacturing, sell out Australian families by increasing their cost of living with a carbon tax—because she thought that was what she needed to do to get the Greens' support. I do not know which will go down in history as the worse political judgement—her decision to betray the Australian people with the carbon tax or her decision to announce an election date so early that it has put a hold on businesses for the months until 14 September. This is a bad bill. This is bad for jobs. This is bad for Australian competitiveness. We will not be supporting this bill.

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