Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, I want to take you back—it wasn't really that long ago—to the election campaign we had through March, April and the early part of May of last year. If you were look at the news clips and the campaign slogans, there were a few campaign slogans from the other side. If you look at the press conferences that the now government and then opposition held, and if you look at what they were putting out into their campaign paraphernalia, they were saying some very specific things.

One of the main themes they ran with was that families and people were going to be better off under Labor. Now, when people hear that they are going to be better off, it has very clear connotations to Australians that they are going to be better off financially. They were quite specific, to give them credit. I will give the now government and then opposition credit because at least they did come up and say exactly what they planned to do. They said on hundreds of occasions—I think the Prime Minister was known to say it on 50 or 60 occasions, and many other ministers said the same thing—that they had one of the most extensively modelled campaign commitments that have ever done. They weren't just making it up, they weren't just having a guess at the figure; they said they had extensively modelled, better than any opposition in the country's history, that they were going to give every family a $275 cut to their power bill.

They were even saying that after the election. Some of the ministers after the May election were then saying, 'Yes, that's right.' The Prime Minister didn't, but some others were caught out in interviews still saying that. Then, of course, there was a dawning, and the now minister for climate change suddenly said, 'Maybe things happened,' and did a bit of a slow crab walk away from it.

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