Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here we go again—another election campaign, another big untruth peddled by the Australian Labor Party. At the last federal election we had the infamous 'Mediscare' campaign. It was a completely dishonest, deceptive campaign that scared pensioners in the middle of the night under the false premise that the coalition was going to privatise Medicare. We heard the comments from the member for Wakefield. He should come to the dispatch box and apologise to everyone in his electorate for misleading them at the last election. He should say: 'I am sorry. I misled you. I tricked you about the Mediscare campaign.' But, instead, he comes into this House and he wears it like a badge of honour. As if it's a badge of honour that the Labor member deceives his own electorate. What a sham! Here we go again. This time we've got the cuts to education. It is a big untruth, which is repeated over and over and over—as the member for Grey noted—in the hope that people will remember it, frightening schoolchildren, frightening parents. Will they ever learn?

The facts are: under this coalition government there is record funding going to schools this year. Never before in the history of the Commonwealth has more funding flowed to Australian schools than it has under this coalition government. And next year they will receive more. And the year after that they will receive more. And yet we have the Labor Party coming in here claiming that there are cuts. Of course, this goes back to the infamous Rudd-Gillard-Rudd regime with their sort of trickery around their Gonski funding. Of course, we all know that we do our forward estimates over four years. And, of course, it just happened to be that their Gonski funding was all back-loaded in years 5 and 6 so they never had to show where the money was coming from, because they didn't have a clue.

Today it's almost as though we live in a post-truth world with the Labor Party. Take the member for Port Adelaide, the shadow minister for energy, who just came in. On his Facebook page he's got a post up sharing the South Australian Premier's post that says, 'South Australia leading the way.' It also says, 'South Australia is already a world leader in affordable and reliable power.' South Australia, a world leader in affordable power! No wonder the member for Wakefield's head goes down, because he knows that South Australia have not only the highest electricity prices in Australia but they now have the proud title of the highest electricity prices in the world. And yet we have the Premier of that state saying that they are a world leader in affordable power. You couldn't make this up—George Orwell could not make this stuff up. For the Labor Party it is like 'freedom is slavery' and 'ignorance is strength'—affordable electricity is the world's most expensive, and increases in government spending are a cut. We see this time and time again. When a Labor member comes to the dispatch box or starts to talk about anything, you really need to check. If they said it was raining, you would need to go outside to check for yourself. Another example: again we had the member for Port Adelaide on his Facebook page last year saying, 'Thermal coal exports are in rapid decline.' Rapid decline for coal exports! The numbers are just in for Australia's coal exports—guess what? They're not in rapid decline. In 2007 we had the highest export earnings of coal in our nation's history. They were up 35 per cent on 2016 levels. Last year we exported $56.5 billion worth of coal, up 35 per cent. That even beats the previous record, in 2011, of 46.7. We had 20 per cent above our best ever exports of coal—and we have the member for Port Adelaide saying that thermal coal exports were in rapid decline. Is there any wonder that nobody believes a word that comes out of the mouths— (Time expired)

See this speech in context