Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

And another myth from the government about core and non-core promises. I will address that on another day; that is the subject of a chapter all of its own. I will not be distracted by the bleachers on this occasion; I will keep talking about the policy uncertainty induced by the actions of this government. What do I mean there? Here is a classic example: all of a sudden, again, the government are the champions of improving our schools. But, hang on, $2 billion is ripped out of universities to help achieve that. A couple of years ago the government were lauding the role of universities in our system and talking about how they were uncapping places and so on and so forth.

My colleagues the Greens made a very important point about the consistency of messaging: if you support education, you sacrifice one element of education in order to buttress another. This is where the mixed messages of this budget come to the fore. This is not how you sell a budget. This is not how you sell a consistent message. There is no message left. The only message is, like Mr Micawber said: 'Something will turn up. Let's just get through the next four months. Let's lay down a few fiscal booby-traps and maybe the other side will have to pay for all the promises that we've made.' That is not to say that over the years the government has not made some good decisions, but the fact of the matter is that, unlike truly successful long-term governments, it has failed to create a consistent and coherent message around what it is doing.

People opened the Daily Telegraph today and saw a list of measures. They saw all the family payments being cut and all the other payments being cancelled or postponed, which were flavour of the month, as it were, last year or the year before. They were championed—that only Labor could protect Medicare, and they started to slash Medicare to build DisabilityCare. They said there would be no more taxes, and then there were new taxes to support DisabilityCare. The mixed messages will bury this government.