Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am always amused when I hear these Liberal members and certainly members from the Nationals lecture about economic competence. The coalition government, when they were in power, had 11½ years to build this country, yet they had not one big vision, not one big initiative. We had massive problems in the hospitals and we inherited massive infrastructure problems. I will come to these further on.

What is Labor doing? Labor will get the budget back into the black by 2012-13. We will build Australia's future workforce. One of the biggest crimes against this country committed by the coalition was to diminish the number of tradespeople that were trained in this country. You handed money over to McDonald's and Red Rooster and forgot that you needed tradespeople in this country to build the country. Your record on building skills for this country was abysmal. It was an absolute national disgrace.

We will build the infrastructure in this country. You were warned time and time again by the Reserve Bank, by the Treasury, by engineers and by academics. Academics said the infrastructure in this country needed to be rebuilt, and what did you in the coalition do? You did nothing because you had no vision and no values to take this country forward with. We will continue, through this budget, to invest $36 billion in roads, rails and ports, including $1 billion in funding for the duplication of the Pacific Highway. We are going to put better hospitals and health care in place. When we came to government, what was the complaint we heard? That the hospitals were in crisis. The coalition could not deliver on hospitals. They could not deliver on health care.

We said we would make every school a great school, and we will make schools great schools. I have opened a number of BER projects and, let me tell you, the number of coalition members who want to come along and actually bathe in the glory of increasing the infrastructure in our schools is quite mind-boggling. Your members are there in droves, trying to get their picture taken with the opening of the new facility that the federal government has put in place.

We are going to help families, we are going to help low-income earners and we are going to invest in our regions. The Nationals, who are supposed to be about regional Australia, delivered nothing but pork-barrelling over all the years they were in power—anything to try and get a vote but nothing of any vision or future proofing of the economy. We will invest $4.3 billion in this budget on our regions and on our businesses. To argue that this is an assault on families and the hypocrisy of the coalition to talk about cost-of-living pressures is mind-boggling.

This is a government which has delivered 750,000 jobs since it has been in power. We will deliver another 500,000 jobs over the next two years. We are prepared to take on the fear campaigns and the nonsense that will leave our economy in the backwoods for generations to come. We will put a price on carbon and we will make sure that our industries are at the cutting edge. We will build for the low-carbon future—something which you know has to be done but which, for pure base political motives, you are not prepared to pull on. We are prepared to make sure that the miners pay their fair share of taxes, that ordinary people in this country get a fair go and that the money does not just slosh around in the back pockets of the mining magnates. We will look after pensioners. We will look after school­children. That is what Labor is about—building jobs and building a good society. Let me tell you about Menzies—the great Sir Robert Menzies that you keep talking about. He said:

Nothing could be worse for democracy than to adopt the practice of permitting knowledge to be overthrown by ignorance.

The knowledge in this nation is being overthrown every day by the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, and his three-line points of view. Tony Abbott is certainly about delivering ignorance, not knowledge, in this country—the antithesis of what Sir Robert Menzies said. Sir Robert Menzies also said:

Fear can never be a proper or useful ingredient in those mutual relations of respect and good-will which ought to exist between the elector and the elected.

Every day in this place, we see a disrespect for the Australian people from the coalition; we see fear and ignorance from the opposition party benches. We see fear being peddled on everything that this government is trying to do. The Leader of the Opposition takes unprincipled positions and shamelessly peddles fear and ignorance.

The opposition are the great pretenders. That is what they are: great pretenders. Tony Abbott is out there masquerading as the friend of workers. Well, workers are onto Tony Abbott. They know he is not a friend of workers; they know he is a friend of Work Choices. They are the great pretenders. The opposition try to tell us they are good economic managers, but what did they say at the time of the global financial crisis? They said, 'Wait and see what happens.' That was the opposition's approach. That has been proved wrong, while it has been proved that what this government did saved and underpinned 210,000 jobs and kept this country out of recession. They are the great pretenders on climate change. Those in the opposition who do believe in climate change pretend that they now do not believe, because the Leader of the Opposition considers it 'crap'. There are those on the other side like Senator Boswell, who just does not believe in it, who keeps telling us that he goes out on his yacht off Brisbane on a regular basis and cannot see any rise in the sea level. That is the level of argument dominating the coalition. The great pretenders try to pretend that there were no disasters in Japan, that the GFC had no influence on the Australian economy, that there were no disasters in Australia—no floods, no Cyclone Yasi—and no disasters in New Zealand. None of those things matter; they really do not matter! They want to continue to run fear campaigns on refugees, on government debt and on climate change.

There is little left of the Menzian legacy in this rabble sitting across from me every sitting period. They are not Menzians; they are extremists—and they are extremists on all the issues that are important for this country.

They talk about us being tough on Australian families—what hypocrisy! Let me go back to what Senator Bushby said a bit earlier in this place. He said, 'We created 380,000 jobs through Work Choices.' Senator Bushby, who is in the chamber, nods his head, because he is a great supporter of Work Choices. Senator Bushby and Senator Abetz want to go back to Work Choices. They want to go back to a position where 65 per cent of workers on individual agreements lose their penalty rates, where 70 per cent of workers lose their shift allowances, where over a million award workers lose $100 a week, where 68 per cent of workers lose their annual leave loading, where 25 per cent of workers lose their public holidays and where 3½ million workers lose their protection from unfair dismissal. Don't lecture us about economic ability; you are a failure. And Peter Costello was one of the worst treasurers this country has ever seen. The record is there. He was incompetent, he had no courage and he did nothing to build this nation—a failed Treasurer, and now a failed opposition.