David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Grayndler proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The Government surrendering the national interest in favour of its own political interest.

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a government that has surrendered the national interest for its own political interests. What we have seen this fortnight is a government that has had an absolute shocker: bungling incompetence followed by embarrassing retreat; one humiliating withdrawal after another.

This week we have seen a modern physiological feat, a man without a backbone performing backflip after backflip after backflip: the Prime Minister—no backbone but plenty of backflips. Since the Prime Minister had his big win over the great pretender all we have seen is the great surrender: surrendering our borders, surrendering on conscience votes, surrendering on petrol prices, surrendering Middle Australia, surrendering on climate change—simply surrendering our future. In fact, ever since the Prime Minister said that he was sticking around, it has been all downhill, and not just for the Treasurer.

Every day we have seen one blackflip after another—no agenda. The Prime Minister’s daily walk is really a warm-up for his daily backflip. And while this government frays at the edges, the needs of Middle Australia are surrendered. Their hopes and aspirations are left out in the cold by a government more obsessed with itself than with the needs of families. It has been an extraordinary fortnight, with surrender after surrender and one embarrassing retreat after another.

We had the Prime Minister surrendering on petrol and then coming up with an on-the-run, cobbled together plan pinched from our fuels blueprint; he took some of it but not all of it. His colleagues, including Senator Boswell, went out and bucketed the plan straightaway. We saw the surrender on interest rates as we blew out of the water the government’s claim that it would keep them low. We saw an absolute surrendering and humiliation of the member for Menzies when he was given a support minister to ramp up the spin. But it is not about spin; it is about cutting the wages of Australians, giving them the choice of that or having to face the sack.

We have seen a surrender on the promise that there would be no $100,000 degrees. There are 96 degrees that cost more than that, there are five that cost more than $200,000 and one, at least, that costs more than the average mortgage. We saw an absolute surrendering on the immigration bill, when he could not even convince his own party that border surrender was in the national interest. And then we saw a surrender on parliamentary procedure because the vote was not even allowed to be held in the Senate, showing contempt for our democracy. We saw a surrender on the conscience vote for government MPs after trying to dictate a cabinet view. We have seen a surrendering of the Treasurer’s view, held also by the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, by the department of the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources, if not by the minister himself, by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and others supporting a national emissions trading scheme. They have been left grasping for an alibi since we raised that question yesterday. We have seen a retreat to the same old tactics of playing the man rather than playing the issue, promoting fear rather than hope in the community.

One of the biggest issues in the community is petrol prices. The Special Minister of State belled the cat on that. He wrote to the member for Throsby and said, ‘We think it is a pretty bad idea for the government fleet.’ It is all right to have rhetoric out there, but when it comes to real action we see that he withdrew and the member for Throsby clearly finished off, in a day, the weakness of the government’s position on petrol.

We need to look at how many Australians will benefit from this announcement. We reckon it is about three per cent. We have asked and asked and received no answer. That leaves 97 per cent of Australians getting nothing—not today, not next week, not next month and not next year. They will have to wait for a Beazley Labor government to do something about these issues.

Then we come to interest rates. The Prime Minister says, ‘I never promised interest rates would not go up.’ We all know what the government campaigned on at the last election. The ads were still on the website last week. Perhaps the person who belled the cat on that was the member for Wentworth, the man born with a silver foot in his mouth! He gave it all up. This member has never seen an interest rates hike that he did not like—how arrogant and out of touch. It might be okay campaigning with the people he goes on his yacht with, as the Liberal candidate for Wentworth, wearing their ‘Malcolm for Wentworth’ T-shirts. It is not too far to drive out to Marrickville. The people in my electorate are struggling big time with their mortgages. I reckon the member for Wentworth will get a bit of a shock. I reckon lots of people in Kings Cross, Paddington and Woolloomooloo, fine constituents of the member for Sydney, are about to go over to the member for Wentworth. I reckon they will give him a message about whether this interest rates rise really is no big deal, which is what the member for Wentworth thinks.

We have seen from the Prime Minister arrogance, indifference and breaches of trust. This Prime Minister has changed. He has been in office simply too long. It happens. It happens in politics and in lots of forums. Last week he went for a walk with Georgie Gregan around the lake. Sometimes it is just time to move on. We are seeing a Prime Minister who has surrendered Middle Australia. We have now seen seven consecutive interest rates rises since 2002 and just this morning we found out that average home loan repayments for a first home have exploded past $2,000 a month for the first time ever. We know that Australians now are paying more as a proportion of their income on interest rates than ever before. We know that the government was elected on the basis of a falsehood—that they would keep interest rates low. We know that interest rates are near to the point the Housing Industry Association calls a no-go zone because people are paying 28 per cent of their income. That has an impact on them and on the economy, but today the Treasurer is wandering around trying to shift the blame. Blaming the states is much easier than taking it on the chin, although maybe he has given up because today we had the extraordinary feat whereby, when the Treasurer was asked a question, he said, ‘Pass. I won’t answer that.’ The Prime Minister simply does not have answers.

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He loved the history question.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The history question which was asked by the leader was a ripper. It pointed out that interest rates in 1982 were 21.39 per cent.

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who was the Treasurer?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We asked who the Treasurer was. The Prime Minister has lost it, because he did not know. He did not take responsibility because he simply never does. Then we come to the issue which above any other will see us win the next election and that is the attack by this government with its extreme industrial relations legislation. This government wants to impose on our kids American style degrees where you have to pay $100,000 and American style working conditions where you work simply for tips. We know that this Prime Minister is presiding over a system of a wages race to the bottom. The great surrender: the Prime Minister’s surrender to China and India. Let us not compete on the high-skills, high-value, high-economic growth road. Let us go the low-wage, low-skill road, a surrender of our children’s future.

What the Prime Minister is saying is that we will not try to compete with those economies on exports and our intellectual capacity; we will try to compete with them on wages. I asked the Prime Minister last week about the Tristar steering factory in my electorate, where 60 fine Australian workers, with an average service of about 25 years, are facing redundancy after 30 September. Why after 30 September? It is because that is when their enterprise bargaining agreement runs out. Instead of receiving four weeks pay per year of service, the company is waiting until 30 September and then, when the workers are made redundant, they are likely to be entitled to just 12 weeks pay instead. The fine people I have met have up to 40 years service and therefore would be entitled to 160 weeks pay. That is what we will see: as agreements run out, this government will use this extreme legislation. It is a surrender of everything that has made this country great—the idea of a fair go and the idea of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. That is what we are seeing under this government.

We have seen a complete surrender on climate change. It is just too hard for the government to make the tough decisions that are needed, for example introducing a national emissions trading system, ratifying Kyoto and being part of the global effort. There is a complete surrender on water. Today there is less water in the Murray than there has been for 100 years. And what has the government done about it?

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a drought in 100 years.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is called ‘climate change’, you fool. This government does not even acknowledge that that is the case. On these issues, the Prime Minister is running not so much a government but a farm. Without a doubt, the parrot on the farm is the Minister for the Environment and Heritage. The minister for the environment made a decision that, because one theoretical parrot every 1,000 years might be endangered, he would stop a $220 million development. But of course, once they took legal action, he surrendered. He backflipped again, which characterises this government.

The Prime Minister is a rodent according to the Liberal Party’s eminent QC, Senator George Brandis. Senator Brandis actually signed a statutory declaration that he only described the Prime Minister as a rodent, not as a lying rodent. That was his defence. So I am glad we have cleared that up. And, of course, there is one person who has been unfairly called a dog from time to time by his party colleagues. But we have seen a transformation: the dog has become a chicken. The Treasurer used to stand up and talk about roosters over and over again. People in the gallery found that very funny, and his colleagues would chortle away: ‘Ho, ho. Isn’t it funny? The Treasurer’s talking about roosters again.’ But you do not hear that anymore. I wonder why that is. Maybe it is because he knows what roosters do to chickens! Maybe that is why the Treasurer has not uttered the word ‘rooster’. He simply will not make that statement.

So on old John Howard’s farm, we have the parrot, the rodent, and the dog that became a chicken. It is time that this government moved on. This government keeps one eye on Middle Australia—or it used to—but now there is just bungling and backflipping. Today we had questions about the Epping preselection, which saw the internal contradiction within the government—once again, it is a government obsessed with itself. We will chase the Prime Minister. We are going to hound him and hunt him every day until the next election, because Australia needs bold, nation-building plans for the future, not the arrogance and incompetence that the Howard government keeps serving up to Middle Australia as it surrenders every single day all the values that make this a great country.

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is as puerile and asinine a contribution as I have ever witnessed in this House. I say this to the Labor Party—I will give you some free advice—if you hand over your tactics, and therefore your political fortunes, to the member for Grayndler, you will stay in opposition for as far as you can see into the future. One of the measures of the effectiveness of an opposition is to judge who is running the show. The member for Grayndler is running tactics and has been for several months now. You can see it in question time. He is the one to the dispatch box, and now in this House we have seen the most banal matter of public importance that is possible to draft, let alone deliver, that we have seen for a long time. It was undergraduate humour, with the member for Grayndler reading his speech. He is such a great comedic wit and talent that he has to read his jokes. Let me tell you: we saw the punch line coming before he got the first phrase out. Talk about laboured, heavy-handed and obvious humour. What it boiled down to was personal attacks on the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. It seemed to me to be a good audition for the Glass House but, quite frankly, it fails the test of parliamentary debate and certainly lacks the substance and the alternative policies upon which people might choose the Labor Party ahead of the coalition government at a future election.

My advice to the opposition is to bring back the member for Lalor. I never thought I would say it: let the member for Lalor again assume a leadership position in parliamentary tactics. I noticed her quite obviously walking out as the member for Grayndler strode to the dispatch box with his swagger and confidence as he was about to abolish the government and watch the Prime Minister wilt under a barrage of criticism so cleverly worded! The member for Lalor absented herself, and quite rightly so. She knows that she has been pushed to one side. We are happy on this side to see the member for Grayndler assume a position of such influence over the Labor Party. He lacks the political judgement and wit to bring the government to its knees as they would want us.

There was a very instructive comment in the contribution of the member for Grayndler. It was arguably the only one! He said, ‘Industrial relations will see us win the next election.’ That strikes me as being somewhat complacent. We on this side do not believe we have won the next election. We do not believe there is a silver bullet that we can lazily rely upon to win office. Talk about underestimating the Australian electorate: to think that one and only one issue will give you office is to completely misread the sophistication and the rightful expectations, even demands, of the modern Australian voter. It is a classic Labor mistake.

Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Arrogant!

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is arrogant. He said, ‘Industrial relations will see us win the next election.’ That reminds me of the GST. It was the Leader of the Opposition who, in his previous incarnation as Leader of the Opposition, during 1998 proclaimed, ‘Labor will ride the wave of GST into office.’

Kerry Bartlett (Macquarie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Surf!

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, he proclaimed, ‘Labor will surf the wave of GST into office.’ He relied on that. He did no work. He did not try to combat the government on ideas, beliefs, values or policies. As a result, he was dumped by that same wave. We have seen it all the way through. The Leader of the Opposition will oppose the government for what he and his colleagues, especially the member for Grayndler, think are popular reasons and then do a backflip. The GST was going to be rolled back. We do not hear about the GST being rolled back now. Once the Labor Party fiercely, unrelentingly and deceptively opposed the GST. Now they embrace it, as do their Labor premiers. Try and take the GST off the Labor premiers and see how far you get.

This is the track record of the Labor Party. They opposed waterfront reform. When we came to office, the average container movement on the waterfront was 16 per hour. We were told, again by the Labor Party, that it was physically impossible to move more than 22 containers per hour. At present they are moving 27 containers per hour and are increasing that. The wages are higher now than they were before because they are paid on a productivity basis. They opposed waterfront reform. Now that we have had waterfront reform and are helping exporters and farmers across the country, the Labor Party have dropped their opposition. They have opposed almost every budget measure that this government has brought in. We inherited a debt of $96 billion. Now we have no net Commonwealth debt, yet the Labor Party opposed every fiscal initiative of this government. We wiped that debt in the face of the opposition of the Labor Party, especially in the Senate. They have done that all the way through our term in office. They opposed our tax cuts, but now they support them.

We do the heavy lifting, as is the requirement of government normally, in the face of stringent opposition and obstructionism in the parliament and then Labor accept the reforms in the national interest. They have opposed policy to make the Reserve Bank independent. They have opposed reforms to the welfare sector to help people find work. Every step of the way they oppose the government, not because they always believe on a basis of conviction in their opposition but because they want to make life more politically difficult and because they want to stir up constituents in the wider electorate. All of that is done on the basis of extortion, deception and at times outright lies. They have opposed our measures to strengthen our borders and to give more powers to our security agencies, to make arrests and make Australia safer.

There is one thing the Labor Party have not done a backflip on. They still oppose the government on border protection and on proper and balanced security measures. They have opposed our reforms to Medicare and they have opposed our support of private health insurance through a rebate system. All the way through the Labor Party oppose, yet they put up this for the matter of public importance debate today:

The Government surrendering the national interest in favour of its own political interest.

You will not sell that in the Australian electorate. Whilst people disagree at times with the government, as is their right, on many of our policies and policy directions, we will explain them. At times we will be responsive to public criticisms but at other times we have to show leadership, win the argument, put the facts, engage in the debate and respect Australians and give them credit for their capacity to have an informed debate. The Labor Party instead sells out Australians. It will not engage in policy debates. This is not a debate about policy. How can it be? The Labor Party does not have any. We do not see a publication from the Labor Party that it believes is worthy of debate in this chamber. Instead, we got ridiculous questions during question time today. It was by and large a waste. To the extent that there were serious questions, they went over old ground. There is no innovation and there is no freshness about the Leader of the Opposition, nor the party he leads.

I find it amusing that the Labor Party would attack the government for putting its interests ahead of the national interest. Does everybody remember former Leader of the Opposition Mark Latham? This is a well-known poster of the now Leader of the Opposition with the former Leader of the Opposition, on which Kim Beazley writes a letter to everybody and endorses Mark Latham. He says things like:

Labor is ready to govern, and Mark Latham is ready to be Prime Minister.

It’s time for a change in government.

Mark Latham and Labor will have a government that solves problems and takes the pressures off families.

The Leader of the Opposition gave a ringing and unqualified endorsement of Mark Latham. Either he was selling out the national interest and presenting somebody that the Labor Party themselves now concede was unfit for the office of Prime Minister or he was lying to the Australian people.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister will withdraw the last comment.

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw that. There was no putting the national interest ahead of the Labor Party’s interest when it came to that endorsement of Mark Latham. I am concerned also that the Leader of the Opposition is again putting his interests and those of his party ahead of the national interest. In Victoria there is a scandalous situation developing, in which a member of the Labor Party, Khalil Eideh, has been preselected for a safe upper house seat. This is a man who has written to the President of Syria, saying such things as—

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The matter of public importance is: the government surrendering the national interest in favour of its own political interest. The discussion of a state preselection can hardly be germane to that.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Wills would be well aware that there probably would not be any broader matter of public importance put before the parliament than the one proposed by the Labor Party today. It is a very broad matter of public importance. The minister has the call.

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The reason I am bringing this up is that it is a matter of national interest that this man does not enter parliament. Mr Eideh has written to the President of Syria and declared:

... the danger and threat from the Imperialist and Zionist is increasing on our Arabic world in general, and particularly on our Arabic Syrian country.

…            …            …

We owe our complete loyalty to and are working to protect Syria.

He finishes by pledging to the President of Syria—a dictator, Dictator Assad:

Loyalty, absolute loyalty to your courageous and wise leadership and we pledge to continue to be faithful soldiers behind your victorious leadership.

That is a man who, if the Leader of the Opposition is serious about the national interest, will not enjoy Labor Party preselection. That same person gave a speech in 2002, reprinted in the Sydney Arabic newspaper—

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is it a crime?

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The crime is that he is anti-Semitic—that is the crime—and there is no dissociation of Mr Eideh by the Labor Party. He is a protege of Senator Kim Carr; he has been warmly endorsed publicly by the member for Melbourne. Let me read a bit more about Mr Eideh to show his unfitness for parliamentary service. In a speech in 2002 he said:

Satan’s brigades are getting ready to enslave the Arab world.

We could see the light of your soul in the face of the martyrs, the heroes, the greatest of free Arabs—those who carry the flag of dawn from South Lebanon and Palestine.

This is a supporter of Hezbollah and Hamas. You talk about the national interest; you stop that man entering public life.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Are you accusing him of a crime?

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Scullin!

Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am accusing Mr Eideh of being anti-Semitic and unfit for office. He has received comfort and support from the Labor Party. Nobody has the courage in the Labor Party to dissociate themselves from him. He is receiving support from the Labor Party in this House.

There are other examples of the Leader of the Opposition putting his narrow interest ahead of the national interest. I refer especially to the issue of fuel. Through 2001 and 2002 the Labor Party ran a campaign against ethanol. You had the member for Fraser and the member for Hotham in their leadership positions attacking Manildra as one of the companies involved in the emerging ethanol industry. They proclaimed that ethanol was unsafe for motor vehicles, they scared motorists away from the use of ethanol and, of course, they have the political cheek to attack the government on petrol pricing when as a group and as individuals they have done more than anybody else to destroy, harm and retard the growth of ethanol take-up amongst motorists.

Now the Leader of the Opposition has done a U-turn. He has reversed the Labor Party’s outright opposition to biofuels such as ethanol because it is more politically expedient for the Labor Party to now endorse ethanol. But the damage has been done. Talk to anybody in the biofuels industry and they will tell you we are several years behind where we should be on this issue of uptake of ethanol and biofuel because of the Labor Party’s actions. There was no national interest then; there was just grubby, political, Labor interest at that time.

But the backflip by the Leader of the Opposition continues. There is no concept of national interest for him. He told the House on 15 February that he would ratify the Kyoto protocol and that he would incorporate into the Kyoto regime a carbon trading arrangement—that is, he would put a tax on carbon emissions. He has told the House this week that he opposes carbon trading. This is a Leader of the Opposition who will say and do anything at any given moment to win votes or attack the government. He is not guided by the national interest. He lacks conviction and consistency and, as a result, the Labor Party lacks credibility. This is a Labor Party without policy. It lurches from opportunity to opportunity and, before much longer, in the absence of any credible policy framework, the Australian people will pass their judgement. (Time expired)

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a government which is increasingly drunk with power. The longer it stays in office the more contemptuous of the national interest it becomes. There is always politics in public life, but this government is always only ever about politics. We have a Prime Minister who wakes up every day thinking, ‘How is it that I can do over the Labor Party?’—a Prime Minister for whom the national interest comes a distant last. We heard a feeble rebuttal from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. You would have thought he would say something—just something—about how this government may have governed in the national interest or give some defence of the national interest, but we got nothing. He was absolutely threadbare.

Why do we believe that this is a government which is not governing in the national interest but only looking after its own political interest? In the first place, there is the use of taxpayer funds for Liberal Party political advantage. We have had a massive government advertising binge with over $1 billion spent in the course of the last decade. Indeed, when we examined Senate estimates in May we discovered that a staggering $250 million in advertising was proposed for expenditure in the lead-up to the next election. That includes over $50 million for the private health insurance campaign, $47 million for the smartcard awareness campaign—you can write to every Australian household many times with $47 million—$36 million for child support reforms and $15 million on independent contractors. This $250 million comes on top of a $130 million advertising placement spend for the current financial year, so you are looking at a $380 million campaign all up. This is a breathtaking abuse of taxpayers’ money. In the run-up to the 2007 election campaign, taxpayers will be footing the bill for political advertising, not the Liberal Party.

The Australian public should brace themselves for wave after wave of propaganda on the scale of last year’s IR campaign. That campaign raised the bar of government advertising and the government clearly has no intention of lowering it. The smartcard campaign is supposed to be about reminding people to register. If you sent out reminder letters, we would all get six letters each. Drunken sailors would be dipping their lids at this level of spending. Hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars will be torched on government spin and propaganda in order to try to get the coalition re-elected.

That campaign has involved Liberal Party advertiser ‘Lucky’ Ted Horton and has essentially reconvened the Liberal Party advertising dream team, with the involvement of Liberal advertiser Mark Pearson and also the former Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, Graeme Morris. This is a campaign which benefits Liberal Party mates and it is unacceptable. Frankly, with apologies to Winston Churchill, never before in the history of government advertising has so much money been hosed up against a wall by so few in so short a time.

We have had a dodgy process associated with government advertising—inadequate tendering and a whole series of arrangements in which proper process had not been followed. FOI documents reveal that the government acted against departmental advice that its Work Choices advertising campaign should not start until after the legislation had gone through the parliament.

It is not only about spending taxpayers’ money; it is also about the damage that this government has done to transparency and accountability. Over the last decade the government has almost doubled its number of advisers to 445. This has greatly assisted ministers where they have chosen to neglect or abuse their position of trust. Their growing staffs have provided politically devoted service. This sort of development underpins the unaccountable nature of the Howard government. Issues concerning proper conduct can no longer be dealt with by this parliament. Advisers have the capacity to shoulder blame and responsibility for a minister’s action or inaction without any fear of real consequences. Parliamentary secretaries cannot be questioned during question time and ministerial advisers cannot be questioned by Senate estimates or other parliamentary committees. What we need is better legislation—freedom of information law being updated so that ministers, their advisers and their departments cannot delay or withhold information on the basis of their political interpretation of public or national interest.

The mother of all accountability failures has been the AWB scandal. These failures have included the pitiful response which this government made to the request by the UN Chief Customs Officer, Felicity Johnston, for Australia to investigate allegations that AWB was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein and the government’s failure to notice the dramatic escalation in trucking fees being paid to Alia. They went up from $US12 a tonne in July 2000 to $US44 a tonne and subsequently $US55 a tonne by December 2002. This was when petrol in Iraq was 10c a gallon and the real cost of inland transportation was estimated at less than $6 per tonne. There was also the government’s failure to investigate the front page of the New York Times, which specifically indicated that Iraq was running a pay-off racket, and, of course, the failure of Australian diplomats in the Middle East to pick up what was common knowledge about the use of Alia to circumvent UN sanctions.

The question is: faced with such monumental failures which led to this massive scandal—the payment of $300 million to Saddam Hussein—what action has the government taken by way of response? Ministers say, ‘We were misled by our advisers,’ but they take no action to penalise them. The only rational conclusion from such ministerial inaction is that ministers are not sincere. Either ministers did know more than they are telling, more than they are letting on, and will not punish advisers for fear of having the whistle blown regarding their real state of knowledge, or they approve of not being advised and want to maintain this system of ministerial ignorance and plausible denial. If ministerial responsibility and public accountability are to mean anything in this country, this system must be cracked open and the public should no longer be expected to tolerate such miserably low standards of ministerial performance.

This practice of the government of putting politics first instead of the national interest has been causing damage to us. It was interesting to read in the Australian recently that the United States says that it now has 72 per cent of the Iraqi wheat market. Prior to the war Australia had 90 per cent of Iraq’s wheat trade. The government’s desire to put their own political interest ahead of the national interest has led to this debacle—we have basically lost the wheat trade to Iraq. We have Australia’s trade and foreign policies being steered by ministers whose surplus of hubris and deficit of steering skills are reminiscent of Toad of Toad Hall. Little wonder our trade deficit has grown and our international reputation has shrunk.

Finally, we learned in the last couple of days that the government have moved to increase the printing entitlements for members of the House of Representatives from $125,000 to $150,000—again, putting their political interest ahead of the national interest. $125,000 is already too high and this 20 per cent increase is totally unjustified. It gets worse. MPs will now be able to roll over unspent entitlement to the tune of 45 per cent or $67,500. That would bring next year’s entitlement up to $217,500. So 2007 will see a rerun of You’ve Got Mailonly it will not be starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; it will be starring a Howard government MP in a marginal seat near you! They have so many leaflets they will probably call out the RAAF to do an aerial leaflet drop.

This reflects the determination of the Howard government to use the benefits of incumbency to build a moat around their sitting MPs and turn each government electorate into a fortress. This is consistent with their attitude to the tax deductibility of election campaign donations and their government advertising binge. If it were happening in countries like East Timor or the Solomons, Australia and the rest of the world would be giving them a lecture about democratic practice and culture. This abuse of taxpayers’ funds for political advantage is a blot on Australian democracy.

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Where does one begin? I do have some sympathy for the member for Wills. He obviously drew the short straw today. He ended with some criticism of the printing entitlement. Let me remind him and his Labor colleagues that under the last Labor government there was an unlimited allowance, but they quite conveniently forget that. Methinks this smells a little of the hypocritical meat pie that he must have had for lunch.

Let us remember one of the Labor members who lost his seat—the former member for Paterson—who spent over $400,000 of his printing entitlement. The member for Wills also said that the current entitlement was too high. Did he tell the member for Richmond, a Labor member, that she spent too much money when she spent $124,968 of her printing entitlement? Why didn’t the member for Wills criticise the member for Richmond? In his opinion she obviously did not need to spend that much money. Let us remember that the Labor Party had an unlimited amount and it was this government that actually brought in limits.

We heard nothing from the opposition about the obvious Labor hypocrisy when in August 2003 Labor joined with the Democrats and Greens to disallow certain entitlements. They forgot to mention that there were some entitlements that were designed specifically to help the Labor Party and the minor parties, like new charter transport arrangements and more computers, mobile phones and business travel for their staff. We did not hear anything about that.

Then again, as I said, I do empathise with the member for Wills. He was stuck with the pathetic, puerile and empty matter of public importance that the member for Grayndler got up today.

Kerry Bartlett (Macquarie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Bartlett interjecting

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No. Obviously there was no policy. There was no comment at all about other significant matters. There was no policy contribution about alternative fuels, no policy contribution about jobs growth, no positive contribution about anything.

He also talked about government advertising. The last year that the Labor Party was in power, in real terms, the amount of money it spent on advertising was more than this government spent in 2002 and 2003. The government does need to spend money on advertising. About $25,000 a year goes solely on defence recruitment. Another $20,000 to $25,000 goes on advisory ads, recruitments and notices for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Electoral Commission and other government bodies. The government also runs campaigns against smoking, alcoholism and the use of illegal drugs. It also urges employers to support apprenticeships and gets people to help environmental projects. That is the majority of government advertising.

Since today is the day that the government held its very important and historic history summit, let us remember a bit of Labor advertising history. Remember the $250,000 they paid Bill Hunter for government advertising? And what did we see? The same Bill Hunter turned up in Labor’s 1996 election commercials. That is just a bit of the smell of the hypocrisy from the Labor Party.

The member for Grayndler talked about the national interest. I have some advice for him—though he may choose not to take it. There is one thing that the Labor opposition can do in the national interest, and that is to be a decent opposition. Any democracy in the Western world demands and deserves an opposition that is hard working, an opposition that is full of members who are representative of the nation they seek to represent, an opposition—

Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That reads the papers.

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed. Thank you, member for Boothby. It deserves an opposition that reads the newspapers and holds the government accountable. An operational and working opposition is an integral part of our democracy. But what do we have? We have tokens. What did the former Labor leader say of the member for Grayndler? He said:

When I rang him he said, “I know Kim is hopelessly conservative, but I started the campaign against Crean, and I’m going to see it through. I wish we had someone else to run, but that wasn’t the case. Beazley was the only one who put up his hand.” I told him the vote might be 46-all, and he agreed. He said if he thought that was the case on Tuesday morning, he would vote for me to break the deadlock. Not the sort of guy you would want in the trenches next to you. Crean calls him a habitual liar and I think he’s right.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Indi will withdraw that.

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was merely quoting from The Latham Diaries.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You cannot quote and use unparliamentary language. You will withdraw.

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw that comment. But, more interesting perhaps, were the more sober comments from the former, very successful Labor minister who contributed significantly to Australia—former Minister Button—when he said that factional leaders of the Labor Party have lost touch with mainstream people and the working class. Of course they have. They are overrun by people who are not representative of their communities. They are overrun by people who were put there by factional leaders and by unions that represent ever-diminishing proportions of the Australian population. What did former Minister Button say? He called these factional leaders ‘control freaks devoted to manipulation rather than thought’. He said:

Those who make it through to parliamentary positions seldom have much impact—as public figures they’re about as attractive as Hannibal Lecter.

That was the former Labor minister John Button. He said that because he had Australia’s national interest in sight.

We have a problem. The opposition is crippled in its ability to be an operational opposition. We see that Mr Beazley’s approval rating is only 34 per cent in terms of who would make a better Prime Minister. The reason for that is that he is a reflection of the statement that his father made. As Kim Beazley Sr said, the Labor Party was once full of the cream of the working class but in modern times it is full of the dregs of the middle class.

We see these unrepresentative people. We had during question time an interesting exchange and criticism—it was an attempt to denigrate and blacken the good name of Pru Goward because she is standing for Liberal preselection. So what did the so-called feminists in the Labor Party, who are supposed to represent all women, do? They are very selective. They do not really perform as part of an operational opposition because, if you get selected as part of a quota, you are a token. When you come to this place, you must expect those who did the hard yards, who were selected on merit, to treat you as a token. The member for Gellibrand was asked in an interview:

You got there through the quota system. Would you have got in without that?

She said:

I don’t think that would have happened without having our rules in place, and I think that that has been a really significant change within the party.

Indeed, it has been a significant change but certainly not a change for the better.

The Labor Party are so desperate for relevance they cannot even bring themselves—this is how bad it is on the other side—to use the words ‘mainstream Australia’ in caucus because of all the lunatics within their extreme left-wing faction. The member for Grayndler said, ‘Sometimes it’s time to move on with regard to leadership.’ What do the opposition do? They know they are down in the polls. The member for Lalor looks very depressed. The opposition spokesman for foreign affairs is down in the dumps. They know these figures are bad, but where do they move onto? We could not have the member for Lalor being the Leader of the Opposition. The right-wing faction in Victoria would not let her, and good on them. They could not let someone who was so unrepresentative and so left wing ever be leader of the main opposition party in Australia. So, for the moment, they are stuck with the current opposition leader, Mr Kim Beazley.

The member for Grayndler, after all, would know a thing or two about putting political interests ahead of national interest. He was the fellow, as Labor’s environment spokesman, who was prepared to trade away Australia’s jobs and risk losing millions of dollars in investment by signing the Kyoto protocol. How was this supposed to be in the national interest? He supported Bracks’s disgraceful plan in condemning our proud history of alpine grazing in Victoria and consigned it to the dustbin. (Time expired)

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The discussion is now concluded.