Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

For the last two years this country has been, at best, on pause and, in many cases, on rewind. The community has well and truly noticed it, particularly in areas like climate change, renewables—we have seen an 80 per cent reduction in investment in renewables—and the vision of where Australia will be as a modern economy in future decades.

For some time we have desperately needed a prime minister in this place who was there for the right reason; who was there because they had a vision for the future and the only way they could achieve it was by being the prime minister. In the previous Prime Minister we had the opposite. But there are many people out there who believed that when Malcolm Turnbull ascended to the prime ministership he would be that person, because he had said so. He had said over many years that he was a man of vision and principle, and they would have assumed that he had sought this top job because of the things he wanted to achieve. I would hope that everybody in this House holds their position for what they can achieve, and I would expect that most are disappointed in the performance of the Prime Minister in the last couple of days, because this is a man who is absolutely the opposite. This is a man whose end game—whose end goal—is to be the Prime Minister. All of the policies and the vision, all of the things that he will do as a prime minister, are all about getting that job and holding it.

This is a man who turns out to be the opposite of what this country needs. When you consider his performance in the last two days on climate change alone, it becomes absolutely as clear as anything that this is a man who will sell out anything to get this job. People believed him because he said it. Let's look at what this current Prime Minister said on his way to the Lodge: 'Liberal frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull, who lost the leadership over his support for Labor's emissions trading scheme, has described the coalition's climate change policy as "farce" …' and an unparliamentary term which I will not repeat in this House. That was on 10 May 2013. In 2011: 'Frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull compared climate change sceptics with people who refuse to admit smoking causes lung cancer.' Today he has joined them. On 22 July 2011 he said:

We have to get real about supporting and responsibly accepting the science. And if we want to challenge the science, we do so on the basis of peer reviewed work …

And today he has joined the sceptics.

On 21 July 2011 he said:

… the globe is warming and human greenhouse gas emissions are substantially the cause of it.

Yet today he got up in this House and supported a policy that has seen greenhouse emissions rise. They were falling under Labor government policy; they are rising now. And today he stood up in this House and said that that was fine. Today this man of supposed vision, this man who supposedly sought the top job because he wanted to do the right thing by the country, sold out completely. He sold out completely in order to get the top job. This is a man for whom being Prime Minister is the only point. This is a Prime Minister who you cannot trust to lead this country. This is a Prime Minister whose self-ambition is everything.

Leaders lead not just in terms of what they do, but in terms of character. When Tony Abbott became Leader of the Opposition we saw a dark cloud descend over the behaviour in this country—we saw the brawlers come out. Who are we going to see come out under this Prime Minister? Who are we going to see reflected by this Prime Minister, and think, 'Oh yes, we're back.' I will tell you who it is going to be: it is going to be the self-interested rent-seekers who come out behind this man in spades, because this is who this man is. This is a man who will trade any principle for his own gain. This is a man who has traded principles that he has espoused, in this House and outside it, for years as key beliefs, and he gave them all up in the last couple of days because he wanted the trappings of high office. He has high office for the trappings, not for the achievements. This is not the kind of prime minister we need at the moment. We have real challenges, but the challenges are in the nation, not in the Liberal-National Party caucus. We need a Prime Minister who can lift his gaze to the nation and stop pandering to in-house in-fighting in order to hold his position.

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