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

They are, as Senator Abetz rightly says, the gift that keeps on giving.

I am sure this carbon tax will gladden the hearts of Senator Brown’s constituency. Most of them are very well-to-do people who probably will not feel greatly a $300- or a $500-a-year increase in their electricity prices. It will be your constituency, Senator Wong, the people who the Labor Party has always pretended to defend, the lower income earners, who will be paying the price of Bob Brown’s conceit. You will rue the day when you sold out your working class supporters for the well-to-do supporters of the Green party. You will rue the day when you sold the Labor Party’s soul for a mess of pottage in order to get the Greens into an alliance with you because they will turn on you, Senator Wong, and they have already begun to. They have fitted you up for this while they preen themselves, puff their chests out and say to the inner city dwellers earning six-figure incomes, ‘Look what we have made this government do.’

The fact is we are all losers from this. Our democratic system is a loser from this because we know that we have a government in place in Australia now that stole an election. Can you imagine what the result of the election would have been if instead of saying, ‘There will be no carbon price under the government I lead,’ the Prime Minister had been honest and said what was really on her mind, ‘There will be a carbon tax under the government I lead’? That would have been the truth but for the fact there would have been no government led by Ms Gillard after 21 August because the people would not have voted for a carbon tax. Our democratic system is the loser by this. The Australian Labor Party is the loser by this because whatever shred of respectability it might have been able to try and cling onto when it comes to accountability and transparency it has now irremediably lost. The biggest losers will be ordinary Australian families, particularly the low-income families, who the Labor Party used to support but has now abandoned, who will not be able to afford the price of the Labor Party’s dishonesty.