Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That was a very daunting contribution by the member for Adelaide, but I want to speak about an equally important issue, and it is trying to understand why Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, says one thing when it suits him and then says something completely the opposite when political expediency requires. Over the week gone, I was listening in the intense Adani debate to the Leader of the Opposition say that not a cent of taxpayers' money should go towards funding this mine while, at exactly the same time, his Queensland compatriots are working out ways to give Adani taxpayer funding in the form of royalty holidays.

By the same token, you will all remember the same-sex marriage debate and clips of Bill Shorten, speaking at a public event, saying that he was completely open to the idea of a public vote where the nation gets to decide on same-sex marriage. Yet all of a sudden, once he was leader, he was virulently opposed to a plebiscite. I remember the comments Bill Shorten made when a minister in government, saying how important it was to be a Keating-like figure and pull down company tax rates to make it easier to liberate resources and jobs into an expanding economy. Yet, the minute he became leader, he was incredibly opposed to the notion of reducing company tax because it is 'tax cuts to billionaires', or whatever the latest rhetoric is, despite only years earlier having said that it was a perfectly good idea.

There is something bigger than all of us in this chamber—the NDIS. Those on both sides have said that it is about contributing according to ability, because we never know which of us may need the NDIS. It is about offering $1.5 million to $3.5 million of support over a lifetime for a profound disability. No-one knows where and to whom that may occur. We have always agreed that it is about contributing according to ability and by percentage according to what we earn. That was fine when Mr Shorten was in government. But now, when it comes to doing precisely what we supported him in doing—raising the Medicare levy by 0.5 per cent—it is all of a sudden utterly impossible for this Leader of the Opposition to contemplate doing what we supported him in doing. How can you get a simpler example of being a backflipper than of pushing in government for a 0.5 per cent increase and then in opposition fighting against a 0.5 per cent increase under the same rules?

On penalty rates, we have seen that this Leader of the Opposition is quite happy to go and pluck an individual worker out of the Capalaba Sports Club and rail against changes in an enterprise agreement that a union is not a party to, and yet this is a Leader of the Opposition who personally, as the then head of the union, wrote up to 120 of these enterprise agreements. You have Penny Vickers out there fighting for dear life for those who are even more worse off under these union designed agreements, only to have this Leader of the Opposition worried about the ones that unions wrote up. This is just evidence of hashtag 'Backflip Bill'. We will be hearing more about it in coming months.

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