Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The first thing I say in response to the shadow Treasurer is that we do not take all credit for winning the last election. I think the Labor Party helped us along the way. I want to personally thank the honourable member for McMahon for his contribution to us winning the last election. It was very generous of him and of all his colleagues. That help was primarily based on the fact that, after six years in government, the Labor Party just did not know what it believed in. The Leader of the Opposition is a great example of that. He does not know what he believes in. He is a man with loyalty to no-one but himself. He is a man who has been loyal to no-one in his life. He was not loyal to Kevin Rudd and then he was not loyal to Julia Gillard. Then, in the end, he was not even loyal to the Labor Party but he became the leader of the Labor Party—and he is not even loyal to the policies that they took to the last election.

They come in here and give us sanctimonious lectures about improving the budget when the Labor Party itself is opposing $5 billion of policies it took to the last election to pay for its own promises—spare us the hypocrisy! They come in here and lecture us about superannuation and yet the Labor Party increased taxes on superannuation by $9 billion in the last six years. There were $9 billion of increases in superannuation taxes. They could not do that with a mining tax they designed, yet they managed to find $9 billion of new taxes on superannuation after Kevin Rudd promised the Australian people in 2007, in writing, that they would not change superannuation 'not one jot, not one tittle'. That is what Labor said in 2007 and that is what they promised the Australian people, and then they broke that promise.

We went to the 2010 election and the 2013 election saying that we were going to get rid of the mining tax and the associated expenditure. Labor does not want to hear this. They do not want to hear this because they are embarrassed by their own policy failures. They are embarrassed by their own political failures as well, because they can hardly complain about us when they will not let us keep every single initiative that we took to the last election. When we come to a deal with reasonable senators in the Senate to get our election commitments through, they complain that we are breaking election commitments. The hide of them! The Labor Party does not know what is right and what is wrong, because they do not believe in anything. Bill Shorten has no core values. He is a man who blows in the wind. He is an insipidly weak man.

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