Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

Way back in the 2007 election campaign, a long time ago—certainly a Prime Minister ago and it could soon be two prime ministers ago—a press release was put out by Ms Gillard, the then Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, and Senator Wong, the Labor Party's campaign spokeswoman at the time, if I recall correctly. In their joint press release, they stated quite clearly, simply and succinctly: 'Labor will end the abuse of taxpayer funded government advertising.' It was almost as succinct and clear a message as: 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' Yet today we have had Minister Combet announce that yet more millions of dollars of taxpayers' money will be ploughed into government advertising, will be ploughed into an abuse of taxpayer funds, because it will be government advertising designed to simply sell the government's deeply unpopular carbon tax policy.

The best that Senator Wong in her answers to questions today could offer was, 'Our spending is not as bad as you guys' were.' That is the best that she could offer. It is also basically the best that Mr Combet can offer in his media release today. I thought those words 'Labor will end the abuse of taxpayer funded government advertising' meant that you would actually end the abuse; not be 'not quite as bad as some things that happened in the past' but actually end the abuse, actually stop it from happening, actually stop the waste of taxpayer funds—but apparently not. Apparently that promise is as meaningless as so many other promises, and in particular as meaningless as this core promise about there not being a carbon tax under a government that Ms Gillard leads.

So we have this remarkable situation today where the government has ditched its promise to get advertising through—but it is going to have its advertising approved by their coalition partners, the Greens. Senator Wong again highlighted in Mr Combet's media release where the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee would approve the final shape of what is to be advertised. So the Greens will be involved in this, despite the fact that Senator Bob Brown has railed against government funded advertising even more passionately and vehemently than anybody on that side of the chamber has managed to do. We have hypocrisy writ large here from the government and from their colleagues in the Greens that they are all getting together to work out how they are going to spend millions of taxpayers' dollars on this government funded advertising campaign.

As if that is not bad enough, buried in this $12 million for advertising, nearly $14 million for public education and awareness, they are going to go along and fund a bunch of their mates who have been helping the government out nicely on the sideline. They are setting up a range of grants programs within that. They are going to offer $250,000 grants to a range of organisations. Today the minister said, 'We have announced the grants program, but we do not have any guidelines and we do not have any rules so of course I cannot rule out whether organisations like GetUp! or the ACTU will be eligible for these grants.' These are the organisations out there spending money on the government's behalf today but who no doubt have every hope they will be able to recoup their money through government grants tomorrow. That is the outrage of the situation we are confronted with here.

We know the government is going to do this. We know it not just through our television sets, not just through those sorts of organisations, but also from evidence in Senate estimates, where we heard how they are going to run a range of deliberative forums. These deliberative forums, we were told, would be rather small-scale groups of people. Another phrase for it might be 'kitchen table discussions'. So we have waste right around the country. The government is going to fund the nation's kitchen table discussions on climate change and its carbon tax as well.