Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Once again, we hear the Australian Labor Party come into the chamber and rail. We hear words like 'justice', 'equity' and 'fairness'. We hear the shadow Treasurer railing about how the government is being arrogant. I think his choice quote was how, as a government, we were treating the parliament and the people with contempt. These are pretty serious charges. How arrogant and contemptuous of us as a government to deliver a promise! How arrogant and contemptuous of us as a government to go to the Australian people before the last election and say, 'If we get elected, because the Labor Party has put the budget in such a stew, we are going to abolish the mining tax and we are going to abolish all the spending associated with the mining tax.' And then, what did we do? We followed through on our commitment. Guilty! Seriously, this is the shadow Treasurer, the man who presided over a spectacular calamity when it came to Australia's finances, now standing up and hectoring and standing up with moral indignation about how inequitable it is, how unfair it is and how Australia will be in a worse situation all because the government is doing what we said we would do.

Look at this joke of a shadow Treasurer and this joke of an opposition. This is the reason the Australian people reject them and reject their approach. They made that point crystal clear in September last year. They made that point crystal clear. Despite the fact that the Australian Labor Party likes to pretend or likes to think that the Australian people are stupid, they are not. They are smart and they recognise when a government has reached its use-by date as the Australian Labor Party did. But the fundamental problem is that Labor has not heeded the lesson. Labor has not listened to the verdict of the Australian people. Instead of actually recognising the shortcomings on their part, they stand up and huff and puff and try to make out that the fault lies with the government. The fact is that we are a government that has honoured yet another commitment. We are government that are implementing the meaningful, mature, methodical approach to governance that the Australian people had a yearning for and that they called out for last September. It is this government and not all the hot wind from the opposition that is going to make a long-term difference to the Australian people. It is this government's decisions—although not universally popular—

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