Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

These are very dark days, indeed. Before those on the other side say I am scaremongering, I do not think of myself as somebody who scaremongers or exacerbates situations. I look at myself as a mother, a wife, a farmer from central western New South Wales and a pretty balanced person when it comes to my approach to how I look at things like the carbon tax. I still come to the conclusion that these are very dark days, indeed.

What we have here is legislation that is based on a lie. We have legislation that is based on probably the biggest lie this nation has ever been told. I know colleagues before me have also raised this issue. That is because it is central to the fact that the Australian people have been misled. I know my colleague Senator Cash yesterday raised this issue in her excellent contribution in the chamber—that the Prime Minister lied to the Australian people. Let us just go back and have a little look at this. Before the last election what was it the Prime Minister said at the time? She said:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

To me, that is pretty clear. That is pretty simple. That is pretty straightforward. If I was setting out across Australia during the election campaign to cast my vote, I would be thinking, 'Okay, the Australian Labor Party are not going to bring in a carbon tax.' I am pretty sure that is what people would have thought. I am almost certain that is what they would have thought because they were told by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, that there was not going to be a carbon tax under the government she led. So they went to the ballot box and they voted.

Let us step forward a little bit. What do we see now? We see the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, giving the Australian people a carbon tax. I do not think you have to be a rocket scientist or even a kindergartener to figure out that the Prime Minister lied to the Australian people. What we have now is a government that was elected on a false pretence. We have a government that was elected on a false promise to the Australian people. And it was barely elected. We have this cobbled together Labor-Greens-Independent government because the Prime Minister was far more concerned about getting into power than forming a government that could actually run the country properly. She simply had no desire to form a government that could do it properly. The reason I say that is that, sitting here today, it is obvious the government cannot run the country properly because we are dealing with this legislation.

Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, was asked on 15 August 2010, just before the election, about the carbon tax. He said:

Well, certainly what we rejected is this hysterical allegation that somehow we are moving towards a carbon tax from the Liberals in their advertising. We reject that.

Hysterical? We were spot on. We were right on the money. We were right on the money when we said to the Australian people, 'Beware of what you are about to buy. This Labor Party will give you a carbon tax.' We got told we were hysterical. We were absolutely right. That is not something I am happy about. I am really sad about that. I did not want to be right about that. I did not want to be right about that because we should not be having a carbon tax. Yet we have in front of us the carbon tax that the government promised the Australian people it would not bring in.

I am not sure whether it makes me completely furious or incredibly sad that we have a government that, on an issue of this nature, would tell the Australian people one thing and then do completely the opposite. Even if we take into account the fact that it was a mistake and the Prime Minister did not mean to do it—I do not think that was the case, but let us give her the benefit of the doubt for a moment—let us go to another election. Let us not introduce the carbon tax until after the next election. We could do then what we are doing at the moment: we could have the debate, we could have the vote and we could determine the future of this legislation. I simply say to the government, 'Say that you will not bring this carbon tax in until after the next election.' Why wouldn't the government do that?