Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

An absolutely harebrained idea, Senator Williams. It was ridiculous. But here we have the killer. Here we have the excuse that cannot be run away from: ‘There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.’ At least someone is going to come in here and admit that the Prime Minister is not leading this government, which some suspect and, I am sure from occasional grins down the other end of this chamber, some of us suspect on more than one ground.

This was a promise that had no qualification. There was no ‘unless’, there was no ‘if’, there was no ‘but’, there was no ‘maybe’ and there was no ‘except’. This was an explicit promise. You cannot run away from video footage. It is there on You Tube. It has been played tens of thousands of times as Australians know that this government is simply trying to obfuscate. This was an unqualified, explicit promise intended to deceive. And there are two reasons we know this—because the government is using many excuses now to try and run away from this. You heard the Prime Minister last week saying, ‘But we always spoke about a carbon price.’  If this is not a euphemism for a tax—which it has been used for in this context—it is being used either to justify a broken promise or as an admission that the promise in the first place was deceitful. When the Prime Minister says, ‘I might have said no tax but I said we would have a carbon price,’ that is an admission of the very deceit that you are being accused of right now.

Then we hear the argument about the new parliament, the parliament where one or two members of the House of Representatives, the place that forms government, campaign on the carbon tax but the leaders of both major parties actually outline how there would not be one. This is code for honesty being no price for power, that there is nothing the modern Labor Party would not sell in order to stay sitting on the right hand side of this chamber. But does it mean the Greens run the show? Is this an admission that to stay sitting to the right of the Speaker the Prime Minister had to actually give the Greens and Senator Brown what they asked for?

We do not have a European style democracy here where the people get to vote for a party list and then the decisions are taken by party leaders behind closed doors. We have a voting system in the House of Representatives that gives people the power to choose who represents them, yet we have a Prime Minister coming in and saying afterwards: ‘A very explicit promise I made days before an election, decided by fewer than 2,000 votes in a couple of seats, does not count. The election was close.’ In fact, that betrays the very purpose behind her speaking those words because Labor always has an excuse.

In 2008 we heard more about the inflation dragon. Who remembers the inflation dragon—the inflation genie, as the then Treasurer also called it? This was the excuse to justify broken promises on health insurance, on the baby bonus, because apparently inflation was the biggest problem. But by 2009, a year after everyone else in the world, they realised they had to find another excuse and here it became the GFC. The GFC was the excuse for everything, the excuse for broken promises again on private health insurance when it was put up again and the excuse to go nowhere near any remote attempt at achieving a balanced budget. Now we have the hung parliament as an excuse. I am not sure whether the Prime Minister wants us to blame the Greens or to blame her, but the truth we have now is that we simply have another excuse.

The elephant in the room is Labor’s honesty. In the vain hope that people forget what this Prime Minister said word for word, they are just following the Labor play book. We saw it with Bob Carr and no tolls in 1995. We saw it with Steve Bracks and no tolls in 2002. You hope that people are going to forget.