Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition Senators today.

Last night at the departing senators' valedictory addresses Senator McGauran likened politics to opera, with love, hate, lust and betrayal all featuring—but, fortunately, no singing. 'Operatic' actually isn't a bad start to describe this Labor government. But, let's face it, The Magic Flute it ain't; it is more like some operatic farce from 18th-century Italy.

When I think back to the 2007 federal election, enter stage right—or should I say stage left!—the member for Kingsford Smith, Mr Garrett. Remember he said, 'Don't worry, once we get in we'll just change it all.' All of us in the opposition know that Labor will do or say anything to get elected, that is true, but the problem over the past four years is not just dishonesty—it is actually far more dangerous than dishonesty—it is incompetence. It is bad enough that Labor makes popular and populist election promises, but it is far worse: they actually take those promises seriously and then—for God's sake!—they try to implement them. The dishonest promises are bad enough, but to take them seriously is a crime and it is a crime on the taxpayer.

Labor governs through a series of brain snaps, glib slogans and, always, broken promises. Remember, Deputy President—how could you forget?—the education revolution, the slowest revolution in recorded history. Its earliest manifestations were the computers in schools fiasco. Mr Rudd holding a laptop—you will recall that—said it was the toolbox of the 21st century. He promised one for each student. What happened? The maintenance and the upkeep of those laptop computers cost three times the capital cost. What had to happen in the end? The parents and schools had to pay more for them. Now what did we learn at the last estimates? In fact schools are charging students to take home those laptops. So, in any case, they are not free. Have any of those laptops been connected, as promised, to high-speed broadband after four years? No. We are waiting for the NBN. Don't worry, Senator Conroy and the NBN will fix it. By the time they are connected the laptops will be redundant.

Remember the trade training centres promised for every school—there were supposed to be 2,650. How many are there after 3½ years? Eighty-nine. At this rate it will take 100 years for there to be a trade training centre in every secondary school. Another abject failure. It goes on. Who could ever forget the farce of GroceryWatch and the horror of Fuelwatch—the theory being, apparently, that if you watched the carrots and pumpkins and the bananas, prices would not go up; that if you fixed an aggressive stare on a bunch of bananas, the bananas wouldn't dare go up in price! And what happens now? They are 13 bucks a kilo. So that didn't work either. Another failure of the Labor government. The granddaddy of all broken promises is the carbon tax. Hopefully that dishonesty will prove terminal.

What all these slogans and brain snaps have in common is this: they sounded pretty cool to Mr Rudd's 26-year-old advisers, but when it came to implementation it was apparent there was no planning, no detail, no costings, no cost-benefit analysis and no business case . It was a total and utter shambles. We have government by brain snap, glib slogan and broken promises.

I know that many are leaving the Senate—many great senators—so on this historic moment I cite Karl Marx, Senator Carr's friend and mentor and grooming inspiration, who once said, 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' With modern communications and the perpetual news cycle, we now have them occurring in fact simultaneously. This government is clearly a farce and it is a tragedy for Australia taxpayers.