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

He did a Gillard. Mr Rudd, the Prime Minister whom Julia Gillard butchered—on this very issue, by the way, of the way to deal with carbon emissions—in one of his most emphatic promises in the 2007 election campaign said that under no circumstances would any government he led interfere with the private health insurance rebate. What happened once Mr Rudd had been elected on the faith of that assurance, among others? He introduced legislation to means test the private health insurance rebate. We could go on and on and on, but each of those events has one thing in common: a promise by a Labor Prime Minister, a solemn promise by a Labor leader to the Australian people in an election campaign, which was flagrantly and shamelessly violated once they got the election behind them. That is what this Australian Labor Party is like and it is in particular what the government of Julia Gillard is like: a government whose word means nothing, whose Prime Minister’s integrity cannot be relied upon, who are prepared to do anything, to say anything, to break any commitment, to abandon any assurance, in order to get through the next election campaign. But the people are a wake-up to them. There is a reason why the talkback radios went into meltdown on Thursday and Friday after the Prime Minister announced that she was breaking this solemn promise.

I could go on and on about the long list of Labor broken promises in the dying days of Mr Rudd’s administration. My office actually produced this very attractive document, the long list of Kevin Rudd’s broken promises. Such was the demand for it that we had to produce a second edition, and at the time Mr Rudd was butchered by Ms Gillard we were into a third edition. Thank you, Mr Brennan. But the record of the Gillard government for breaking its promises in a much shorter period of time than the Rudd government is even worse. If I had the time I would read into the Hansard the 53 broken promises that we have tabulated since the 21 August election. But I will not dwell on that for a moment, because there is a more important issue to address, and that is the cost to Australians of this broken promise.

If you are a member of the Australian Labor Party, you do not live in the world of ordinary Australians and you do not live with people in the suburbs who have the cost pressures of normal families and normal suburban life; you live in this cocooned environment, this surreal environment, which is the modern Labor Party.