Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think it is quite interesting that those sitting on that side would want to talk about waste and government expenditure, given what we had to live through for the 11½ years of the former government. Has Senator Barnett forgotten the repetitious advertising that we had to endure? Australians were just so sick of ‘Unchain my heart’ advertisements when we had the GST, and who can forget those appalling advertisements? They were so repetitious. The former Howard government were spending more money than Coca-Cola on TV advertising towards the end, with those appalling Work Choices ads. But I have to say, from this side of the chamber, I thanked the former government for that investment because I am sure that the frequency, the repetition and the hollowness of those advertisements promoting their Work Choices policy in fact worked in our favour rather than in theirs. So it is rather extraordinary that you would have, on a day like today, a discussion about government waste.

I want to go to other questions around the former government’s waste and mismanagement, and I go to two of my favourites: Sustainable Regions and Regional Partnerships. We had a beautiful example of the almost total waste of $17 million on the Atherton Tablelands, west of my town of Cairns. We had examples where the previous government—