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

Minister, you want to talk about amnesia? Honestly! Look at the disasters that you and your entire government run away from. Day after day after day you run away from these disasters. I talked about home insulation and we can go to many other places or we can just rehash the fact that you were the one who developed a policy that you could never get off the ground and took to the 2007 election and, to get yourself out of trouble on that, you simply had to spend not just a little bit more but around $45 billion or $46 billion more, when it is all tallied up, to manage to get your new policy off the ground. That is a remarkable feat, Minister, something that I am sure future taxpayers will look back on and shake their head in wonderment at how a minister got away with such a tactical manoeuvre. I congratulate you for the tactics there, the tactics of getting a policy so wrong but being able to convince the Prime Minister of the day to go along with you on something even bigger, even grander and even less proven. It is a remarkable accomplishment in a political sense but a terrible accomplishment in a policy sense and in a budgetary sense for Australia.

As I was saying, there will be losers under this bill if it is allowed to pass. Among the losers will be the taxpayers, who will be paying more, and the developers, who will lose choice. Householders and others will also be among the losers, who will find that they are waiting around because there is not the competitive tension, the competitive dynamism, within the industry.