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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (Senator Conroy) to questions without notice asked by Senator Cormann, Ryan, Ruston and Williams today relating to the carbon tax.

Three years ago, we were told by Ms Julia Gillard, the then new Prime Minister, that she was taking charge of a good government that had lost its way. That was the justification given by Ms Gillard for her unprecedented seizing of the reins of the Labor Party leadership and the prime ministership of this country from Mr Kevin Rudd. She claimed that it was a good government that had lost its way; that caused people like Senator Farrell, Senator Feeney and Mr Shorten to engineer unprecedented change; and that saw the Australian people effectively go to bed one night with one prime minister and wake up the following morning to discover they had a different prime minister. The Australian people had absolutely no say in the matter, which was decided by the factional controllers of the Labor Party.

It may then have been a good government that had lost its way, but now it is simply a government that is lost. Whether it is under Mr Rudd or Ms Gillard, this Labor government long ago lost any sense of unity. As the old saying goes: 'If you can't govern yourselves, you can't govern the country.' That is clear from what we see from those opposite. The ongoing civil war in this government really knows no boundaries. Long ago, this government equally lost any credibility for its financial management of the country, with the record debts we have seen, the record levels of deficit and the promises to return the country to surplus this year, only to have those promises broken. This government long ago lost the confidence of the Australian people in its ability to successfully deliver any of its programs—be they the school halls program, which saw massive cost blow-outs and caused a great waste of taxpayer money; be it the pink batts program—