George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The real question in this debate is why the Prime Minister said one thing on 16 August in order to get elected and did the opposite after her government had been commissioned. That is what this debate is all about—how the Prime Minister grossly deceived the Australian people. At the time of the 2010 election there was a lot of uncertainty in the air. The polls were tight, the Labor Party had had a terrible campaign, as they themselves later acknowledged, but there was one thing for sure, there was one thing about which the Australian people could be absolutely certain—and that was, come what may, whether we had a Labor government or a coalition government, there would not be a carbon tax. That was one issue that had been sorted because the coalition throughout the election campaign had made a commitment that there would be no carbon tax if a coalition government were elected. Mr Abbott was emphatic on that from the beginning to the end of the election campaign. On our side of politics the Australian public had nothing to fear from a carbon tax. But they also had this assurance from the Prime Minister. On 16 August she stood on the Kangaroo Point Cliffs in Brisbane after she gave a Labor Party policy speech and looked down the barrel of a television camera and said:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

Let me say that again, because this was a very deliberate, considered statement. She said:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

There was no wiggle room there. There were no ifs, buts or maybes. There were no weasel words. There was no ambiguity. She said:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

She said that five days before the election. Promises, undertakings and assurances do not come more ironclad than that. Any elector who was uncertain—and a lot of people made up their minds in that last week—went to the polls knowing that if the Prime Minister of Australia was a person of her word and was telling the truth there would be no carbon tax under any government she led.

Fast-forward to last Thursday when the Prime Minister, flanked by Senator Bob Brown, Senator Christine Milne, Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor, stood in the Prime Minister’s courtyard and said, ‘There will be a carbon tax.’ This is not all that hard. If the Prime Minister on 16 August, five days before the election, says, ‘There will be no carbon tax under any government I lead’ and after she grafts her way back into power she announces there will be a carbon tax, have the people been misled? Of course they have been misled, and everyone who heard and relied upon the Prime Minister’s integrity when she made that statement on 16 August and now knows that she has retreated on it, she has abandoned it entirely, knows what this Prime Minister’s word of honour is worth. They know what this Prime Minister’s word of honour is worth. This government is without integrity. It is without credibility. It cannot be trusted to stick to its most solemn assurances.

But it was not merely the Prime Minister. This is what the Deputy Prime Minister said on the day before, on 15 August:

What we rejected is this hysterical allegation that somehow we are moving towards a carbon tax.

And a few days earlier on the same issue this is what Mr Swan said:

We have made our position very clear—

that is, speaking about a carbon tax—

We have ruled it out.

As I said before, it is not very difficult. It is not rocket science. When you have the leader and the deputy leader of the government the week before an election in which a carbon tax is one of the great issues emphatically, specifically, unambiguously rule out a carbon tax and when they find themselves back in government after the election and the events that happened in the weeks subsequently they introduce a carbon tax, did they mislead the Australian people? I do not think there is any person who has followed this debate who is in any doubt about that. In fact, looking at the long faces on the government back benches, there is not one Labor senator who is in any doubt about that.