Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In November of last year we proposed a matter of public importance that the government was not the government they had promised to be before the election, as shown by their actions afterwards. It was true in November 2013 and it is even truer today. There is a big gap, growing bigger, between what this government said before the last election and what they do every day. We have seen an unfair budget, friendless and built upon lies. We have seen the cuts to the ABC and SBS, where this Prime Minister expects to get a medal for telling Australians that he lied to them before the election. We already know that, Prime Minister. He talks about the Australian Defence Force pay. Before the election and, indeed, since the election, this government say they love our defence forces but then put in a proposition which would see the wages of our defence forces fall behind cost of living. Yesterday this Prime Minister said, 'What a good fellow I am, because I am going to hand back the leave entitlements that the defence forces already had.' This is a man who makes his own parsimony a virtue. He is still cutting the wages of defence forces, and they are not keeping pace with the cost of living.

Of course, we have the debacle over the submarines. Before the last election, the hapless Minister for Defence said that he would build the submarines at the ASC, and now he will not and he will not even have a competitive tender. We have the euphemistically named 'Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs', yet there is half a billion dollars being cut from Indigenous affairs in Australia. There is the misnomer—the complete passing off of himself—where he calls himself the 'Prime Minister for Women', yet he is putting a new $500 tax on the superannuation of over two million working women. Before the last election, this Prime Minister made a hero of himself by tackling former Prime Minister Gillard. He said that he would be a Prime Minister who would be more honest than any we have ever seen in Australian history, but he governs on lies, nasty surprises and pathetic excuses.

They know they have a problem in the government, because they are leaking like sieves, complaining about each other. They know they have a problem. What is worse is that Australians know that they have a problem, because they have got a government who is not adding up to what it said it would be. What is the strategy we get from the Prime Minister? It is a 46-minute therapy session. He has read what John Howard did in 2001 and has said, Oh, the book says I must go out and pretend to be contrite.' So he goes out for 46 minutes, does his first press conference on domestic matters in months and expects Australians to be sufficiently grateful that the Prime Minister has turned up for work on one 46-minute period in the last two months and said: 'Oh, that must be a reboot. We must have reset the government.'

When we thought that the government were willing to try to reboot, we never predicted that they would deploy the secret weapon of the government—Christopher Pyne on the text. That is the latest reset strategy. They have had the barnacle removal—the barnacle debacle—reset. They have a council of war. Goodness only knows what that group of older white Australian men are doing in their council of war. Maybe they might want a second woman in their cabinet. No, no; I get ahead of myself. Instead, we have the Prime Minister deploying Christopher Pyne texting, and we have as our evidence for this Senator Glenn Lazarus—a man who knows no fear on the playing field. The government have deployed a secret weapon—which makes such a skilled and powerful athlete slightly annoyed at the very least. We have a Minister for Education who is doing more texting than Shane Warne! The problem he has is that the Senate know exactly what they are voting for. No amount of text messages from Christopher Pyne—and he still has to explain how he got Senator Lazarus' phone number, because Senator Lazarus says that he did not give it to him—no amount of unsought attention from the Minister for Education and no amount of 'demon dialling' from the worst Minister for Education in the history of Federation changes a bad and rotten set of proposals. It is not the message that is the problem; it is not even the text messages that are the problem—annoying as they are; it is the plan to slug Australians with a debt sentence and make it harder for ordinary kids to go to university.

They have not changed their policies. The Prime Minister thinks he can turn up and say that he is 'not in compliance'—the man mangles the English language—'with what he said before the election.' This means he lied to people. What he does not get is that changing your tactics does not actually change the substance. The Australian people do not want a GP tax on the sick and the vulnerable. The Australian people do not want $100,000 university degrees holding back young people and older people from fulfilling their potential. The Australian people do not want a petrol tax increase—which they were promised before the election would not occur—pushing up their cost of living. The Australian people do not want the indexation rate on pensions cut, robbing older Australians of up to $80 a week over the next 10 years—demonstrating what this government really thinks about pensioners. They do not want cuts to schools and hospitals, stopping us from being smarter and healthy.

Fixing the budget will take more than texts from Christopher Pyne. It will take more than some angry messages from the former Victorian Liberal government to the Abbott government. Why on earth did they introduce a petrol tax, member for Aston, in the first week of the election? It is a good question, isn't it? We will get to the bottom of that one day. Apart from all of these matters, where we have a government of broken promises, implementing their unfair budget, desperately pretending that the problem is not their unfair budget but just the way they are selling it, there is a greater problem underway in this country a year and a quarter into the administration of the Abbott government. We are at a tipping point on the question of trust. During question time this week, the Prime Minister has loved saying, 'You can trust me.' He puffs his chest up, swaggers around and says, 'I can be trusted. Even if I haven't actually kept my word, I can be trusted.' He thinks the simple repetition of the word 'trust' makes him trustworthy.

On the contrary, there is a gap of unprecedented size emerging in Australian politics between the trust that is given by the people who are governed to those that they elect and there is a gap between the trust which is given by the Australian people and the delivery on that trust by the government that they elected. This failure of trust, this emerging gap, which is the real reason for the growing unpopularity of the government, arises from the paucity of principles and persuasion of a government that lacks leadership and lacks commitment. The lesson from Victoria, in which a first-term government was voted out—and which we know the Prime Minister wants to pretend had nothing to do with the Abbott government—is in part that they told the teachers of Victoria that they wanted them to be the highest paid and then attacked them, they said they respected education and then attacked the institution of TAFE and they said they respected the work of the paramedics and then attacked the ambulance officers and turned their back on them. That is the same problem that lies at the heart of the Abbott government. Those opposite say one thing before an election and then do something else straight after getting elected.

Before the election the Liberal and National parties sloganeered. Led by the Prime Minister, they sloganeered, they simplified, they promised the world. Indeed, many on the backbench must have wondered why Prime Minister Tony Abbott made so many promises, because now they are a noose around the neck of the government. The problem is that the government knew that once they got elected they were not going to keep the promises they made. They knew that. They were always just going to do what their right-wing ideology wanted them to do, which is cut and slash and wreck the nature of this country. The problem is that when the government breaks the trust of the Australian people our democracy pays a price for it. The problem is that the government is traducing the political process in this country. The government is leaving the Australian parliament a more diminished place.

The Prime Minister loves to complain about the opposition. The problem is that it is the Prime Minister's own conduct, his own inability to concede error, his own unwillingness to keep the faith with the Australian people that is damaging the Australian economy and is damaging Australian political processes. They complain about the Senate. If they just stuck to what they said they were going to do they would not have to worry about the vagaries of individuals and with the way they chase them. We have heard the stories from the crossbench about the reckless desperation of the government lobbying. The government says to the crossbenchers, 'What do you want?' There is a tone now of begging in the government's approach to the Senate. The government put itself in the position of being dependent on a hostile crossbench because it insists on breaking its promises and wrecking the Australian people. The tendencies of the centre of Australian politics are being damaged by the move to the extremities by a government that is sadly adrift. This is a government in search of a compass to find out what it should do.

Those opposite are debasing and dividing this country with their unfair budget. Never in political history have we seen a budget still being debated in December. That is the truth and they know it. This is not a government seeking to improve this country; this is a government seeking to grovel in its own low level of mediocrity. Labor will do better than this. Next year Labor will not only be fierce in our resistance to the government, we will not only hold this government to account but, as we approach the next election, provide a better alternative to Australia than a list of Tony Abbott's lies, as long as that is.

See this speech in context