Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to follow in the footsteps of Senator Faulkner and Senator Singh in this motion. I have high expectations of ministerial accountability. There is no script for this debate today, and frankly I cannot rewrite history for the opposition who had minister after minister fall like dominoes when in government, one after the other, after they had campaigned on clean government and their code of ministerial conduct. I do not need to retell the story that Senator Singh and Senator Faulkner have told this afternoon. We know that the former coalition government had minister after minister fall like cards—Jim Short, Brian Gibson, Bob Woods, Geoff Prosser, John Sharp, David Jull, Peter McGauran, John Moore, Warwick Parer—in just a few short years after the Howard government took power. That is not even the end of the list. But the Gillard government has high standards of ministerial ethics. I, the Australian public and the Australian Labor Party expect our ministers to uphold those standards of ministerial ethics. The opposition when in government had many ministers fail their own code of conduct, one after the other. So there was a complete lack of formal accountability demonstrated by those opposite. Why? Because they were not accountable. They have not been account­able, as Senator Faulkner and Senator Singh have clearly demonstrated. Even now they waste this parliament's time as they spend time trying to score base political points. That is not accountability. Cheap political scoring of points is not accountability. There is no accountability from the senators opposite in this place. They do not make a contribution even to substantive policy debates. Why? Because they are devoid of policy.

So let us talk about ministerial accountability and what Australians expect from their ministers. Take things like education and skills. We know that nearly 20,000 fewer apprentices commenced a trade in the 12 months to March 2007. There were only 78,000 apprentices. We have 97,000 apprentices which started a trade in the last 12 months, and that is a record number. Take the national curriculum. They failed to deliver a national curriculum for 11½ years. We are rolling out the first national curriculum here in 2011. The Gillard government is increasing university educa­tion enrolments by half a million places, whereas we know that enrolments were just 400,000 in the year 2008-09, 20 per cent fewer than we have now. So, taking education and skills, critically important issues for our nation, where is the shadow ministerial accountability on policy and where is the shadow ministerial accoun­tability on the cost of living when we know that we have an opposition with policies that will simply drive up the cost of living because they have no accountability? They have no accountability for their direct action on climate change policy. They say they want to implement it through direct action but they want to do it without a department and they have no plan to implement it. Take regional Australia: they will axe the Regional Infrastructure Fund; they will axe that $6 billion fund. Take the age pension: in 11½ years of government they failed to deliver a substantial pension increase. Take the cutting of mental health services—