Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was attempting to quote the former Queensland Premier Wayne Goss, referring to Paul Keating but it is in fact a political dictum. Whatever Wayne Goss left behind, which was mainly wreckage, he left behind one of the great political dictums, that if your lie is big enough, your backflip is big enough, the Australian people will not forget and they will wait on their porches with baseball bats. How true that is today. That is now set in stone as a political dictum.

I know those on the other side will be hoping this uproar all week will simply fade away given that there is not much sitting time. They will hope it is all contained within the Beltway. But it is not. This will not fade away, it will not settle down. The Prime Minister thinks she is going to win the debate. That is what she told the caucus. It is delusional. By the way, it was nice of her to turn up and inform the caucus, considering she did not tell it anything about the decision she was making. It was nice of her to come in and tell you, ‘Hey, I can win this debate,’ when no-one else has. I wonder if she choked up during the whole thing when she was telling it, put on a nice performance for you all. She has done that before. I am sure some of them have fallen for this within the caucus. I am sure some of them are going to take the wait-and-see approach, but it is too late. I am sure some of you believe—at least two of you in this room, I would say—that she just wrote your political death warrant.

I am trying to be helpful, Senators on the other side. I am not just saying this as some sort of biased, unstudied political rant against you on a Thursday afternoon. No. I have actually studied this issue. I have studied the politics of it. I have studied the issue in depth. In fact, I have—and we all have—been through this very debate before. It is deja vu again—which I say with tongue in cheek, for the Hansard. It was called the emissions trading scheme—the great big new tax, the one that Julia Gillard convinced Kevin Rudd to abandon, then dumped him for doing so, then promised not to introduce it but announced its return. How byzantine! Is that byzantine politics, Mr Acting Deputy President Forshaw? You are a scholar of history. That is byzantine. You know what I mean—layer on layer of politics, complex, unreadable. It is byzantine.

All the senators here would remember this, but I am compelled to walk those from the other side through a bit of political history, in the hope that I might jolt you from your current stance and that you might have the fortitude to stand up to the Prime Minister. I do not want to leave this place cynical. I want to think that, if I put up a rational debate to you, if I make my point quietly and with some intelligence, my argument will not fall flat. But look at the both of you. What, am I kidding myself? But I will attempt it. Mr Acting Deputy President, I can appeal to you. Six months into Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, it was all Rudd love. He was riding high. The Labor Party were riding high. What is more, the whole issue of climate change was quite popular on the scene. Do you remember that? Some six months into your first term, under Rudd, there was then a by-election in Gippsland. It is worth noting what happened in that by-election, in all that swirl. The Latrobe Valley region is full of rusted-on Labor voters—coal workers, power station workers. In the Latrobe Valley region, there was an issue—it was not the major issue but it was an underlying issue—in regard to taxing power stations and the loss of jobs. You can guess who was running that issue. Little was understood—remember the context of the history of this—by those workers and those voters about this new tax, but they had fair whiff that their jobs were under threat, that living standards would decrease. And what did you get? You got historic swings of more than 12 per cent in every single booth of the Latrobe Valley.

So, when the debate came on full-blown a year later, in 2009, and all the consequences were understood—that workers would lose their jobs—there was a workers’ revolt. The polls plummeted. The Prime Minister lost his job. The policy was pulled and an election was all but lost, but for one seat. Yet on Thursday here we are again. The Prime Minister, having learnt nothing from history, has announced a carbon tax. We are back to square one. The reason you got rid of Kevin Rudd is historical, but it will come back to haunt Ms Gillard—the very same reason. Where are the senators, the plotters, that got rid of Kevin Rudd for this very reason? We are back to square one. We are back to arguing the ideology of the tax. You certainly are. But most of your party really do not agree with it. I am pretty sure the chair does not—