Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Last night I attended a dinner in the Great Hall with the captains of Australian industry and I heard there a very calm, thoughtful, balanced, intelligent speech by the chairman of the Australian Industry Group. He then introduced the only other speaker for the night, and what we heard then was an absolute embarrassment to the people of Australia—a shrill, ignorant speech that really embarrassed us. I went around to the Great Hall this morning and had a look at the floor. I thought there must have been something unusual about the floor because there was a point in the Prime Minister’s speech last night when suddenly for about 30 seconds everyone was looking at the floor. It was an embarrassment at the table I was at and it was an embarrassment at all of the tables that I could see around me. People were embarrassed that this was Australia’s Prime Minister, with such a shrill speech at that sort of event. The issues that the chairman of the Australian Industry Group raised very sensibly in his introduction were not addressed at all by the Prime Minister.

As Senator Brandis indicated in his very thoughtful question at the beginning of question time today, this government simply cannot be trusted. The Labor Party under Kevin Rudd were in free fall a couple of months out from the election and one of the reasons was that they were trying to tax Australia’s resource industries out of existence. All the mine workers, particularly in states like Western Australia and Queensland, could see that their jobs were being put at risk by this mining tax. After the brutal stabbing by Ms Gillard of the then Prime Minister Rudd, Ms Gillard had to do something to try and reverse the electoral defeat that was staring the Labor Party in the face, and the easiest thing to do was to gather up the three biggest mining companies and make a deal with them.

One should perhaps be a little sorry for BHP, Rio and Xstrata today, now that they realise they have been treated with treachery by the Prime Minister. I cannot really bring myself to have sympathy for those three companies because they were so keen to climb into bed with Ms Gillard in the period before the election and save the Labor Party from ultimate annihilation at the election. I do hope that those three companies reflect upon the part they played by crawling into bed with Ms Gillard and its impact on the election held in August.

Unfortunately those companies, whilst they deal with a handshake with billions of dollars around the world, were fooled by a politician of Ms Gillard’s standard. She made a deal with them which, she led them to understand, contained certain arrangements. Yet she knew at the time, I suspect—and certainly it has since become clear—that she had no intention whatsoever of complying with and honouring the deal that she had made. She got through the election—admittedly Labor were almost defeated, but they were saved by some other deal, with a couple of Independents and the Greens, which I am sure will also go the way of the deal with the mining companies—but she has broken that deal this week. This should be a salutary lesson to anyone who would deal with this government that this is a government that simply cannot be trusted. It is an embarrassment to me as an Australian to have a Prime Minister and a government that cannot be trusted. Three of the world’s biggest companies now understand that they cannot deal with the Australian government. We saw last night a Prime Minister who simply cannot be trusted. In her delivery of that speech, with her pettiness, childishness and immaturity, she showed that this government is an embarrassment to all Australians. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.