Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It takes a lot of courage for members of the most incompetent government in Australian political history to come in here and lecture us on policy and budget failure, on wrecking the country and on losing faith with the Australian people. The Labor Party in the Rudd-Gillard years was the most incompetent and most inept government that Australia has ever seen. I know that there have been bad Labor governments in the past. We could look at the Keating government and the recession that we had to have. We could look at the Whitlam government and see economic vandalism on an epic scale. But nothing matches the Rudd-Gillard years for the sheer waste, sheer incompetence, sheer ineptitude and sheer tragedy that they inflicted on the Australian people.

The Leader of the Opposition was not just the great assassin of two prime ministers under the former government he was one of the key architects of all of the policy disasters that they oversaw. The member for McMahon, who is in the chamber, was not just the Treasurer for some of that time but also the immigration minister, who oversaw one of the great disasters. The member for Ballarat, who also sits on the front bench, was a frontbencher during the time of the previous government. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the member for Sydney, sitting opposite me now, was a senior member of that government. Half of the shadow cabinet today were key architects of the disasters that the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government inflicted on the Australian people.

We should never let the Australian public forget the incompetence, disaster and waste that those opposite inflicted. I would like to outline three categories in relation to the former Labor government that we should never forget. The first is the human tragedy of the former government's policy failures. The greatest human tragedy occurred in relation to boat policy and border protection. I am glad that we have the former immigration minister, the member for McMahon, sitting in the chamber, because he was one of the architects of their policy. Their border protection policy is arguably the greatest policy failure in Australian political history. When the Labor government came to power in 2007 there were no boats coming, there were only four people in detention, there are no people drowning at sea and there were no children in detention. They decided to unravel the Howard Pacific solution, which policy worked. What did we see as a result of their policies? We saw 800 boats and 50,000 people arrive on our shores, an $11 billion blowout, 1,300 people drown at sea and almost 2,000 children in detention centres where there had been none beforehand. This is the raw human tragedy of the failure of the Labor governments in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. We have had to deal with this mess and we have dealt with this mess to stop those human tragedies.

The boats have now stopped coming. There are fewer children in detention now than there was at the end of the Labor years. Almost half the number of children are in detention. There are no people drowning at sea anymore because of the work which this government has done in fixing up the absolute disaster which the Labor government inflicted and the human tragedy that they inflicted. They should be utterly ashamed for that policy failure. It is one of the greatest policy failures in Australian political history. They should never forget that. But the tragedy is that they have not learned from it, because they are still determined to go to the next election and not proceed with our policies now, which are working. They have still not committed to turning boats around when it is safe to do so. That is one of the key measures that have saved children from drowning at sea and saved the boats from arriving on Australian soil. That is one of the great tragedies also.

The other policy failure on a monumental scale, which is an enormous human tragedy as well, is the pink batts disaster. This pink batts idea came out during the GFC. I do not know whose idea it was to think, 'We have got a GFC, a global financial crisis, so I know what we will do: we will put pink batts everybody's roofs.' What an idea! It was not just the policy idea that was the great failure but the implementation of that idea which again had financial consequences and had enormously tragic human consequences. We know that as a result of that pink batts disaster—which the Labor Party oversaw and members who are sitting there now, the deputy leader and the member for Swan, oversaw—that 220 houses burnt to the ground. It saw four tragic deaths. They are deaths that we will never get back.

That is the human consequence of epic policy failure, which the Labor Party has never faced up to. There was a royal commission into the pink batts debacle. The royal commission said, after considering the full policy failure here:

The reality is that the Australian government conceived of, devised, designed and implemented a program that enabled very large numbers of inexperienced workers - often engaged by unscrupulous and avaricious employers or head contractors, who were themselves inexperienced in insulation installation - to undertake potentially dangerous work. … It should have done more to protect them.

It goes on:

In my view each death would, and should, not have occurred had the HIP been properly designed and implemented.

I do not raise this for any other reason than to point out that when you have policy failure, it can literally lead to deaths. It has done so. It did so in relation to border protection and it did so in relation to the Home Insulation Program.

The next category of policy failure is waste. I could go on for hours and hours, if not days, in terms of talking about the policy failures of waste. I think perhaps the very greatest one of them all was the NBN, which Malcolm Turnbull is now slowly getting back in charge of. In 2007, they promised the NBN and they costed it to be $4.7 billion. That was their policy: $4.7 billion in 2007. Then on the back of a napkin on a plane, they redesigned it and it came up to being $43 billion. An independent study found that actually it probably would cost $73 billion to be fully implemented. That is only a $68 billion difference between their initial proposal! After six years of promising they were going to have fibre to every single home, how many people actually had it? Fewer than 0.5 per cent of households actually achieved it. They only achieved less than 20 per cent of their initial rollout target and they only achieved less than seven per cent of their target for paying customers. That is just one where we saw waste at an epic scale.

We all know about the school halls. It was $16.2 billion program. We know that between $6 and $8 billion was basically wasted because of over costs. School halls were built in schools that were closing down. We know about the $900 cheques that were sent to backpackers and 27,000 Australians living overseas. Those $900 cheques were sent to 21,000 dead people. This is waste at an absolutely epic scale. We are not going to be lectured to by members of the front bench who were the key architects of this waste and oversaw these things. They had $67 million to administer a set-top box program. They had the live animal exports, which they shut down after seeing a television program. They then had to spend $100 million dollars to try to get the industry going back up again.

This is type of waste which they oversaw. This is the type of waste that has led to tragic human consequences, and has led to financial mismanagement on an absolutely epic scale. This is exactly the type of thing that we are getting back on top of. (Time expired)

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