Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I know they do, Senator Cormann; they tell us all the time. They provide us with this information. They see the failed policies. They see these extraordinary interventions in the private marketplace with, quite frankly, hideous consequences. We see no-one prepared to take responsibility for the failings, and this is the great shame of this government. They are shameless in distancing themselves from all their policy failures. It is always someone else’s fault—it was the last government’s fault. The last government had the highest level of private health insurance participation. We had shorter waiting lists in our hospitals than there are now. That was another broken promise by Mr Rudd and his government. I wonder if the people of Australia remember that one: ‘We will take over the hospital system in 2009.’ They have not managed to achieve that. In fact they are washing their hands of it and doing the Pontius Pilate in saying: ‘No, it wasn’t us. It was the states. We now have to come to a reasonable agreement with them.’ I am sick of it and my constituents are sick of it. The Australian people are getting very tired of listening to the empty vessels in this government making all sorts of unsubstantiated claims and never bearing account for them.

We are going to hold them to account today by voting against these bills. This government said that they would not be messing with the Medicare levy surcharge. On 20 November 2007 the Prime Minister said:

Federal Labor will also maintain Lifetime Health Cover and the Medicare Levy Surcharge.

He went on:

Both my Shadow Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, and I have made clear on many occasions this year that Federal Labor is committed to retaining the existing private health insurance rebates, including the 30 per cent general rebate and the 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians.

Clearly that is more nonsense because they have already introduced the bill. It has been rejected and now they are going to reintroduce it to change those rebates.

How can this government hold their head high? This is the great moral dilemma facing this government now. How can they backflip, twist, spin, somersault, pirouette—how do you want to describe it—flip-flop on a core election commitment and then have the audacity and the hide to go on public television and come into this chamber and the other place and say: ‘We are honouring our election commitments’? It is absolute nonsense but they hope that, if they speak for long enough and use enough long words, the public and the commentariat will get confused and will not actually know what they said.

The Australian people and the commentariat, the observers, those who are absolutely interested in politics and those who are just observers of it or even casual acquaintances with what goes on in this place, are waking up to the fact that we have the most dysfunctional government that I can recall in my lifetime. Of course there was one parallel, but I was only a boy, and we thank Sir John Kerr for his contribution to democracy on that occasion because he saved Australia from a terrible fate. We are about to have a very similar fate befall us under this government, which has completely lost control of its financial capacity. It has lost control of taxpayers’ money. It has even lost control of its own programs.

This government received warning after warning about the failure of its programs and about the dangers of some of its programs and it ignored those warnings. In fact it beggars belief that departments would receive warnings for a minister and not give them to him. They prepare warning after warning, and they get independent warnings about the dangers of some of the programs and the inherent flaws in them, yet they do not bring them to the minister’s attention. There is a grotesque failure of policy process somewhere. Who is going to wear the responsibility for it? According to the Rudd government ministers and to Mr Rudd, who endorses as first-rate the minister who has prevailed over that particular disaster, no-one is going to wear responsibility. It is a shameful day.

These bills exemplify once again the lack of substance, the bluster, the falsehoods, the misleading promises and the empty rhetoric that this government has come to typify. In fact, I think it actually represents a disdain in many ways for the Australian people. When it comes to an election the Australian people render their choices based on what politicians say and on their track record. Unfortunately in Mr Rudd’s case they did not have a great track record to assess. They had his track record in Queensland which was hushed up. I remember when Senator Joyce tried to table some documents regarding Mr Rudd’s contribution in the Heiner affair in Queensland. The Labor Party would not allow us to do that because they did not want Mr Rudd’s track record to come under scrutiny.

The Australian people believed in what Mr Rudd said because he was Kevin and he was from Queensland. We have discovered that Mr Rudd does not have the same integrity as many of my colleagues from Queensland. We have found that Mr Rudd was prepared to do anything and say anything and blame anyone just to get into power. When he got into power he did not know what to do. He honestly has not known what to do, so he has stumbled from one failure to another. He has presided over one policy failure to another, from one broken promise to another broken promise, and the Australian people are getting very tired of it. Some of the programs that, of course, Mr Rudd has implemented—and I have spoken about a couple of them—have been mired in abject failure, yet he then has the hide to try and blame the opposition, or the minor parties or the states. It is always the blame game. He is always going to blame someone else. I seem to recall some more rhetoric in the wind about ‘the buck will stop with me’. It is time to end the blame game, particularly in health.

Not content with failing to implement the programs he said he would, the Prime Minister now wants to implement policies that he said he would not. This is the very crux of this matter. Mr Rudd and his team have an ideological hatred of private health insurance. They want to get people out of private health insurance and onto the teat of government because that means there will be a bigger bureaucracy—bigger government with people reliant on that government. It is the wrong way to go, but that is what this legislation does. This is another stick—a stick which will beat families in this country. It is going to cost them a lot of money every single year, for what purpose? So that this government can continue to spend irresponsibly. Deep in your heart, Madam Acting Deputy President Hurley, you know I am right. You know I am right and the Australian people know I am right. We have never seen such an abject waste of money and such wanton expenditure with so little to show for it. I should now say, Mr Acting Deputy President McGauran, deep in your heart, you too know I am right.

This government is now struggling to make a positive agenda for the Australian people. It is clearly only seeking to prop up its own re-election. How can it do that? The government’s attitude is: ‘Let’s target those people who don’t support our ideology,’ meaning those who do not support big government. ‘Let’s target those people who want to get on with their own lives and want to take responsibility for themselves. Let’s target those people who have built Australia, let’s penalise and punish them. Why do we do it? So that we can take money into our coffers and hand it out to those we deem worthy.’

The Australian people are worthy of a fair go. They are worthy of being given incentives to do the right thing and when we have a hospital system which is so clearly struggling—and it is struggling—why would we be pursuing any sort of measure which will increase demand on the Australian hospital system? Make no mistake: these bills, which we are discussing now, and a bill which will come up later, are absolutely related. These bills are trying to pre-empt the consequences of their own policy, which they are going to introduce later today or perhaps later this week. It is time for this government to come clean with the Australian people. It is better to fess up and say, ‘We really haven’t got a clue what we’re doing. We’ve spent far too much money but now we’re in a big hole and we need to get ourselves out of it. Can you help us?’ Who knows? The coalition might help the government to try to rectify the mess.

The greatest help we could give the Australian people would be to be re-elected later this year because another term of the Rudd government means another three years of waste, of dysfunction, of ego and of hubris unforeseen—you cannot imagine how they strut the corridors of power in this place, strutting around thinking they are the masters of the universe. They are not the masters of the universe. They are servants of the Australian people and they are failing the Australian people at every single turn. It is time to restore some balance and harmony into this place. It is time to restore some balance and harmony among the Australian people so that those who need help will get it, but the government are not intent on helping anyone except themselves.