Mal Brough (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You certainly did make your contribution. These are the sorts of perils that the Labor Party left the coalition to clean up: mountains and mountains of legislation failure; put on top of that expenditure for revenue that was not raised; and the coup de grace was to devise a tax that actually creates a liability for the Commonwealth. That is pretty special effort, and to be able to achieve that you have to wear moniker of being the 'world's greatest Treasurer'. Well, I tell you what, when he is out there in the real world I ask him to tout that. That is when the rubber hits the road. When the soon to be former member for Lilley fronts up and touts his wares, the people of this nation—who create the jobs that produce the taxes that allow us in this place to distribute those taxes evenly and equitably around the country—will just shake their heads, scratch their brows and wonder how the hell it is so. I tell you what else they will do. They will realise what a mammoth task the coalition has in trying to right the wrongs of six years of Labor.

This monumental failure is there at the forefront. To think that nearly 12 months after the election they are still trying to defend the indefensible. Why not walk away from failure and admit that you got it wrong? We all make mistakes. This just happened to be a pretty big one. The member for Perth belled the cat and said this probably did not do the job it was designed to do. It did a lot worse than that. It actually created long-term liabilities in the form of expenditure that was never going to be matched by income. It also provided a windfall directly to some of our largest miners while damaging the prospects of our middle-income miners and those who are trying to grow jobs in less than rich resources, I guess you might say.

I want to share one last thing which goes to how much damage the Labor Party did. This is a true story. A small mining company here in Australia, wanting to mine in Tasmania, raised capital in the UK. In that capital raising the people that gave this Australian company the money said that the money 'may only be used in your Mozambique mine, it cannot be used in your Australian mine' because 'Australia is too much of a sovereign risk'. Isn't that an extraordinary thing to hear, that Australia was too much of a sovereign risk? These are the true consequences of incompetence, and not only incompetence but that when you stick to it you do not learn by your mistakes, you continue to defend those errors and try to paper over what you have done to this great economy and to this wonderful industry for Australia which underpinned the tax cuts that the Howard government was able to deliver over a 12-year period which gave us surpluses—

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