Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Now that Senator Mason has taken his seat and stopped shouting through this chamber, as he has for the last five minutes, we can perhaps put some sense back into the debate and respond to some of the misleading statements he has just made, which are right in line with and follow on from the thinking of his leader, Mr Abbott, who has also been found to have misled the Australian people.

The ANAO report which has now been released has stated clearly that the govern­ment's advertisements were not misleading at all. Yet Mr Abbott has made a range of claims that they were inaccurate, and his allegations have now been found to be untrue. No wonder Senator Mason has to shout his way for five minutes through another diatribe of misleading information in this chamber—he is following his leader. Senator Mason loves misleading and lying to the Australian people on climate change, because we know that he does not believe in climate change. Senator Mason and his leader, Tony Abbott, are in denial of the fact that we need to act on climate change, which is exactly what the advertisements were all about.

Even though the ANAO report has identified that there were some concerns with the processes, we should not confuse this identification with a finding that the ads were inaccurate; as I said, the ANAO report found no such thing. The ads were not misleading, and I am startled by the hypocrisy of the opposition's talk about misleading people through government advertisements. We know full well that when they were in government the ads they aired to the Australian people were misleading—in fact, they were a complete hoax. They told Australian working people that having their wages and conditions reduced by Work Choices was going to make them better off. That is what you call misleading, not the government's ads, which have now been cleared and found certainly not to be misleading or inaccurate by the ANAO report. Yet Tony Abbott has continually claimed that they were. The Work Choices ads of the former Howard government were misleading to working Australian families. They suggested that the wages and condi­tions of working Australian families were under threat and proposed Work Choices as a solution. How dare the opposition come into this place and say that our ads were misleading when they clearly were not. They are the misleading opposition, and their leader, Mr Abbott, should apologise to the public servants involved for saying that the government's ads were inaccurate when they were not.

Clearly the opposition have lost the plot and completely given up, as Mr Mason showed us during his five minutes of shouting and screaming. They are the ones who are misleading the Australian people. They have lost the plot and given up. They have given up and we have only to look at the economic management side of their responsibilities to see exactly how they have given up. When it comes to economic management they have no real policies; no real costings—and now they have walked away from the surplus that they once said they would try to deliver; no real savings; no real bottom budget line—in fact they have a budget black hole of $70 billion; and no real leadership. What we have seen from Senator Mason in his response today to taking note of answers is another example of how he is continuing Mr Abbott's misleading claims which have now been proven to be unfounded by the ANAO report, which found that the factual statements in the government's clean energy future advertising campaign of last year were supported by evidence that shows the opposition have been dishonest and discredits Abbott's scare campaign on carbon pricing. (Time expired)