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

Most people in this place know I come from the arts sector. I spent most of my life before this place working there. In the arts industry, there was a really interesting debate on the nature of arts and the nature of entertainment. Essentially, it came down to a very simple thing. On the arts end of the spectrum, you decided what you wanted to create first and then decided how you might sell it; on the entertainment end of the spectrum, you decided who you could sell it to and then decided what you wanted to create. The reality for most artists, if they want to earn a living in their lifetime, is that they need to be somewhere on that spectrum immediately away from either end.

When I moved into the field I am in now, politics, I found the same kind of argument—the argument between what is governance and what is politics. Again, most of us will sit somewhere on the spectrum between those who decide what is the right thing to do and then work out how to sell it and those who look for what is a popular view and then deliver on that view. Somewhere between those two is where most of us live. Watching the current government, I have come to the rather unfortunate conclusion that we have a government that is entirely and totally at the political end the spectrum. They consider first and foremost and only the political advantage of their actions before they determine what those actions might be.

You only have to look at the behaviour of the government when it comes to our major businesses, our manufacturing sector and Qantas to confirm this view. We had the spectre of the Treasurer back on 27 November undertaking what can only be called a random walk-through of possibilities in a public space—raising the issue of Qantas, talking about debt guarantees, talking about bailing the company out, talking about relaxing the foreign ownership rules and literally all the possible options. That is the kind of action that a government that is actually concerned about its role in government would never do. A government that is concerned with outcomes for industry would never take the kind of public random walk-through of policy options that we have seen this government undertake through November, December, January and February as they threw out thought bubbles on all the different options and raised havoc with the Qantas share price.

We saw the same thing when the Treasurer trashed the reputation of Holden in this place and in public over several days while the government decided what the best political position would be on the future of Holden. I cannot help but agree with the journalists who have been writing in the last few days that it is becoming increasingly clear that the government's entire approach to Qantas is not actually about Qantas at all; it is about trying to wedge the opposition politically. This is an astonishing approach for a government to take. This is a major public company—

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is the right thing to do.

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

Well, Minister, I do not think it is the right thing to do to throw out thought bubbles over every possible option over three months and dramatically impact the way people think about a company in the way this government has done. If the government were serious about considering the future of Qantas, it would do what a real government would do: carefully and transparently raise the issues in a way which did not actually cause the kind of extraordinary response and outcry that we have seen in the community. Unfortunately, this is not a government at all concerned with governance; it is a government purely concerned with politics and it probably does not deserve the title of government.

We have also seen the Treasurer and the Prime Minister make some extraordinary statements that demonstrate absolute lack of understanding of the issues. We have seen the Prime Minister and the Treasurer in the last few days, for example, with their outrage over what the Qantas management said about the price of carbon. They made some extraordinarily ignorant statements about Qantas's lack of need for funding because of the statement they made. That is an extraordinary attack on a public company—a company that this government should be working quietly, meticulously and seriously to assist through a difficult time. This is not the time for rhetoric, it is not the time for politics; it is actually the time for government and it is about time they got on with it. (Time expired)