Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you again, Mr Acting Deputy President. It may illustrate my point that there is a stark gulf between us about the courtesy in which we have observed and heard the others in silence versus the wilful interruption and the disrespect that is shown from the other side. That only pales into insignificance with the disrespect that they have shown to the Australian people. This government has not demonstrated a positive vision for the future of this country.

All that the faceless men and their acolytes are consumed with is clinging to power. So they scramble and they struggle. They introduce these ad hoc policies, which, as we know, have more and more spin attached to them, just to keep their heads above water. But they are drowning and the Australian people are drowning with them. And, contrary to what those on that side of the chamber might say, it is not due to climate change and rising sea levels. It is due to your incompetence. You are unable to swim in the big ocean that requires navigating as this government.

Labor cannot competently run the country and that is why their greatest skill, their only skill, is to take anything positive, any ounce of initiative—the spirit, the kernel of entrepreneurship that has governed this country, run it and seen strength and positiveness build up in it—and stifle it by running their bludgeon hands and their big government poetry over it. They will always attack those with hope and optimism for the future. And they do that because their leader, the Prime Minister, has demonstrated many, many times that negativity is their modus operandi. She is more concerned about calling the opposition leader names than coming out with practical solutions to improve our nation. You know instinctively and the Australian people know that there is something desperately wrong with that approach from a national leader.

Ask yourself: what is this Prime Minister most famous for? It is hard to make a choice, but she gave this famous speech in which she labelled the Leader of the Opposition a misogynist, simply because he happened to disagree with her policy approach to things which have demonstrably failed in so many areas. She is of course famous for promising the Australian people that there would be no carbon tax under a government she leads. We now have the world's biggest carbon tax. It is an extraordinary admission of failure, to make that promise at an election, to then inflict it upon the Australian people and to then have the puppet masters behind the Prime Minister, people such as Paul Howes from the AWU—who hangs out with billionaires in his private time—saying on the public record that there is no carbon tax in this country. You cannot believe the sense of delusion and detachment from the reality that is confronting the Australian people more so than that from Mr Paul Howes and his union comrades.

But the Prime Minister is also famous for stabbing her colleague, the former, duly-elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in the back and taking over the leadership of the Labor Party at the command of the faceless men. None of these are good stories. We know that; they are part of history. But the problem is that Labor have been so consumed with their guilt and how to atone for their sins over the last five years that they have no vision for the future. The only thing they can say to the Australian people is: 'Please, forget about the past; we've got these great plans that we are going to instigate in the future when the budget returns to surplus.'

Let me draw upon the words of my colleague Senator Brandis yesterday: 'This government will go down as the first government in nigh on 100 years never to have delivered a budget surplus,' because Mr Swan and Ms Gillard, who promised repeatedly that there would be a budget surplus because it would be in the interests of the country, have not been competent in managing Australian taxpayers' dollars.

Senator Furner earlier in his contribution talked about low government expenditure as a proportion of GDP. What Labor conveniently ignore is the $50 billion, or thereabouts, every single year—that is, almost $1 billion a week—that they borrow from overseas to prop up their extravagant and wasteful spending. It beggars belief that Senator Furner can talk about how proud he is of these beautiful school halls that only cost twice as much as they would have under any competent building program. It is extraordinary that they wasted $8 billion. He must be equally proud of the pink batts in all the houses, which cost another $1 billion to remove because they resulted in deaths and houses being burnt down. He must be equally proud of the taxes that are going up and up and up and are making it very tough for the Australian people to make ends meet. What is Labor's answer to that? 'We'll just hand out some more borrowed money to you.' It is not sustainable and the Australian people understand that.

The Australian people are looking for optimism and a vision for the future. That is why the Australian people welcome plans that come out about expanding our use of dams for perhaps generating power or storage of water or about tax reform and abolishing some of the pernicious taxes that have been inflicted upon the Australian people. They want more flexibility in their workplace relations laws so that they can employ more people and small business can get on with doing what it does best: generating wealth for the owners, the workers and the community. They want the government to get out of their lives. They do not want the heavy fist of this Labor socialist Greens alliance that is just creeping into every aspect of day-to-day life. This is the negativity that has been sown over five years in this country. I would ask the Australian people to cast their mind back to that bountiful and golden time of the Howard years, even as recently as 2007, when people thought running the economy was easy, that anyone could do it—'We'll even give Kevin Rudd a go.' That was when, apparently, Kevin Rudd was a conservative.

The result is stark. Unless you are committed to a true course of action that is consistent and ideologically sound, rather than adopting this haphazard approach of throwing up policies, cooking them up in a plane on the back of an envelope, like the NBN and other fiascos—unless you are diligent, committed and understand where you want to go in government, as in life, you will end up somewhere other than where you want to be. Even the Labor Party, even their fiercest acolytes, have to acknowledge that not one person in the government wants to see us in the position that we are in today, compared to where we were six years ago.