Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It is an absolute delight to follow Senator Nash. What an excellent contribution she has made in highlighting the hypocrisy of the government. Four days before the 2007 election, Mr Rudd said:

More than ever, Australia needs a government that will help the nation fulfil its promise rather than a government which makes promises it cannot fulfil.

Today in this Senate, 813 days after Mr Rudd was sworn in as Prime Minister, we as a Senate are being asked to clear the path for him to break yet another one of his many election promises. I, for one, and the coalition will not be party to allowing the Prime Minister to break yet another one of his election promises.

Wasn’t it galling before the last election to listen to the pomposity, to see the licking of the lips and the flicking of the hair—the caricature that he has now become? It was sincerity writ large! Hand on his heart, he said: ‘I’ve always been an economic conservative. It’s so vital that a government doesn’t break its promises, that a government doesn’t make promises it cannot fulfil.’ This is a promise that Prime Minister Rudd can fulfil; he simply does not want to because he is still engaged in the old concept of class warfare from 50 years ago. That is what this is all about—it is to hit the aspirational classes of Australia. It is to try to cause division within our community.

It also highlights that the Prime Minister is on track to break yet another election promise. Remember his hand-on-heart promise in relation to whales? He was going to take Japan to the International Court of Justice. He sent the Oceanic Viking into the southern seas to gain evidence. Now, all of a sudden, it is: ‘We are going to take Japan to the International Court of Justice in November this year.’ I will make this wager: the federal election will be called before November 2011 and Mr Rudd will seek to escape from that election promise. We then had the fuel tax promise, the GROCERYchoice promise, the GP superclinics promise, the computers in schools promise, and so the list goes on. Broken, broken, broken—every single one of his promises is now simply empty air.

What about the biggest of them all, the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’? What was that again? That’s right—climate change. He said 22 times before the last federal election that climate change was the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. He said it 22 times! It was a lot of hot air, yet again; a lot of blah, blah, blah; a lot of blather; a lot of talk and absolutely no action. Indeed this was ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time’. It was so important that it was going to be a double dissolution issue and was going to be brought back first thing when the parliament resumed this year.

After a couple weeks of sitting and having been through the House, I had a look at today’s order of business in the Senate and was surprised that the government that orders the business in this place thought that the greater moral challenge for this place was not to deal with climate change but to help Prime Minister Rudd break an election promise. This is now Mr Rudd’s version of moral challenges. The great moral challenge for him is no longer climate change but the breaking, yet again, of an election promise. What we have here on the Senate order of business is the private health insurance legislation, then the crimes amendment, then trade practices. You then turn over the page and there are messages from the House of Representatives. Even the International Tax Agreements Amendment Bill is a lot more important all of a sudden than the climate change policies.

If it is the greatest moral challenge of our time, I simply ask Mr Rudd: with all his moralising, why does private health insurance and a breach of an election promise all of a sudden increase in status and stature? The answer is that he knows that the opinion polls have shifted on him on this issue. We now know that the barometer for Mr Rudd, with his great moralising, is not what he believes in but what he thinks the opinion polls are telling him at any given time. That is why this great moralist said during the election campaign that he had always been an economic conservative, yet in his first speech bagged out Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. Go figure. How do those two match? A classic example was when he first got into parliament: Mr Rudd thought the ticket to ride to make him popular would be to bag out Margaret Thatcher. Then, when economic conservatism had won the day, all of a sudden he had been an economic conservative all his life.

A man who changes his spots so willingly, who switches and changes so unashamedly, is hardly one to try to moralise—yet that he did. Twenty-two times before the last election, the greatest moral challenge of our time was climate change; more recently, it did not even rate a mention in one of his Australia Day speeches. But breaking an election promise on private health insurance is now undoubtedly the great moral challenge of his time. I indicated at the commencement of my remarks that four days before the 2007 election Mr Rudd said:

More than ever, Australia needs a government that will help the nation fulfil its promise rather than a government which makes promises it cannot fulfil.

It just happens that, also four days before the last election, one Mr Rudd, federal Labor leader, wrote to Dr Armitage, Chief Executive of the Australian Health Insurance Association. In his second paragraph, which I quote in full, he said:

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 rebates for older Australians.

Nothing could have been clearer than that. It was a cast-iron guarantee. Indeed, he condemned the Liberal and National parties for running an unprincipled scare campaign on this issue. The Australian people today know that our scare campaign was not a scare campaign but a correct character assessment of the now Prime Minister, the then Leader of the Opposition. We knew that he would not be supporting private health insurance. We knew that he would not be supporting the aspirational classes of Australia. We knew what he was up to. Yet he was able to skate through, make these promises and reassure the Australian people. But now he has to be brought to account, and brought to account he will be by us as an opposition and by the Australian people.

The Australian people are now sick and tired of this legacy of broken promises, of all this talk and of all this moralising. Everything is put in moral terms. If you do not agree with Kevin Rudd on climate change, you are somehow immoral. If you do not support him now on his broken promises, I wonder what his explanation would be. Undoubtedly, he would have some moral construct within which to frame his assertions. But the simple fact is that this is a broken promise pure and simple and nothing that he says will be able to get him out of it.

Let us keep in mind that 11 million Australians have private health insurance and each one of them can expect to pay more for their private health insurance premiums because of what Mr Rudd wants to do. That is particularly bad for low-income families and it is bad for older Australians. It is also very bad for the public hospital system. As you and I know, Mr Acting Deputy President, the more people that get out of private health insurance, the greater the burden on the public hospital system will be, meaning that that system which is supposed to genuinely look after the needy will not be able to look after them as well as they otherwise would be because fewer people will be in private health insurance.

I still recall the days of Mr Paul Keating when he required some hospital treatment and, miraculously, he got in the front of the queue. I understand that it is now occurring in the electorate of Robertson as well—that certain people are assisting people to the front of the queue. That is all very good for some people if they have Labor Party connections in the state of New South Wales, but that should not be the basis upon which our health system operates, and that is what Mr Rudd seeks to engender with these changes.

Senator Xenophon, when this was first discussed—around the time of the budget last year, so it would have been about May 2009—described it as a significant breach of trust by the government which had long promised to retain the rebate. That is what it is. You might say that a coalition that is very supportive of private health insurance might say that a Labor government would behave in this way, but Senator Xenophon is on that page. All the political commentators are recognising that it is a fundamental breach of promise. This is a government that now claims it needs the extra money. I must say, the figures are very rubbery by any analysis. The government says it is a savings measure. This is from a government that has hocked this nation to the tune of $125 billion. I do not accept the government’s figures—let’s get that straight—but, for the sake of the argument, what Labor says it will save on this measure has already been blown, and more, on the pink batts fiasco. So you ask yourself, in setting the priorities for the government: ‘What is more important—keeping an election promise and keeping the health system at least somewhat functional by maintaining support for private health insurance or junking that in favour of this ill-considered pink batt program?’ We now know that Mr Rudd’s priorities are pink batts over private health insurance rebate support. That is his priority. What is more, he deliberately breached an election promise in relation to private health insurance so he could find the moneys for the pink batt program. That is the reality.

If Mr Rudd thinks that somehow the private health insurance issue will give him a better double dissolution trigger than the climate change issue, I say, ‘Bring it on,’ because we will then be fighting a double dissolution on the government saying, ‘We should have a mandate to break our election promises. Sure, we gave you a solemn guarantee that we wouldn’t, but that naughty, naughty Senate, which road-blocked parliamentary democracy, is actually making me keep an election promise. We can’t have that. We’ve got to clean out this Senate and bring in a new Senate that will simply rubber-stamp every broken election promise that I want to force through the Senate.’ I say to Mr Rudd, ‘Bring it on and let’s see what the people of Australia will say,’ because they will not only remember the broken promise on private health insurance but also remember the uber-hyping of climate change—and that is what it was. It was the greatest moral challenge of our time that has now just disappeared from any part of his—what is his term—conversation with the Australian people. It sounds so good, doesn’t it—having a conversation with the Australian people. It was misleading the Australian people that he was engaged in. There was no conversation. It was just a torrent of words with no substance behind them. Today the Australian people are recognising that. It is not only this private health insurance breach; it is a breach on the GP superclinics and it is a breach in relation to public hospitals.

Mark my words: a very bad parliamentary week will be finalised by Mr Rudd throwing in a circuit breaker. You wait: on Thursday or Friday this week, Mr Rudd will hold a press conference and announce that he is going to do something on health—what’s the bet—or something else to try to stop the cycle that it is now enveloping Mr Garrett, himself, Mr Swan, Ms Gillard and Mr Tanner.

Then we have other promises: the whales, Fuelwatch, GROCERYchoice, computers in schools—the list just goes on and on. This is a Prime Minister who is good on the blah, blah, blah—all talk and no action. When he finally does act on something, like in this legislation, it is actually a breach of his solemn election promise, and that is why the Australian people are fast losing faith in Labor and in Mr Rudd in particular. Mr Rudd was the one who made the promise—he signed the letter on 20 November 2007—and Mr Rudd is the man trying to force this through the parliament. Why should we as a Senate allow Labor to breach its election promises? We as a coalition will not. We will expose not only the breach of an election promise but also the deficit of this in public policy terms. This is bad for the public health system and it is bad for individual people’s health, especially those who genuinely rely on the public hospital system.

In brief, what we have is a litany of broken promises and now a request for us to somehow clear the path for him to break this promise as well. We as a coalition will not stand for it. We believe what we had in place was good, sound public policy—and that is why Mr Rudd embraced it at the last election. He knew how popular it was. He knew that it was good policy. But he now thinks that he can do a backflip. He has something else coming. I simply say to him: if he wants a double dissolution on a broken election promise, bring it on and bring it on with climate change—that which was his greatest moral challenge at the time, which is now fallen down the order of the parliamentary timetable. I simply say, your great moral challenges, if they are such, are not determined by the opinion poll of the day; they are actually cast in moral terms. But that is what exposes the nonsense of the Prime Minister: everything is cast in moral terms until the opinion polls change on him and then all of a sudden it is no longer such a burning moral issue. That is where, if I might conclude, he is so different to the person that he claims was a mentor—namely, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That was a man who knew what the moral challenges of his time were and was willing to face the consequences. Mr Rudd has no idea about standing by genuine convictions. We as an opposition will be opposing this legislation.