Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Oh, right. The Liberal Party's primary vote in Western Australia, by contrast, was 47.3 per cent. I am proud to share that this was the highest across the country. When you look around electorates across the country, the coalition won 51 seats on the primary vote alone. Where did Labor finish? Labor won just seven seats on the primary vote. This resulted in a clear mandate for the Abbott-Truss coalition government, and I will come to that at another time in another debate in this place. So we can see Labor does not want to admit there is a problem, but it is making some progress minute by minute.

Unfortunately, we have not seen much imagination from Labor in the past two days. In question time, this very issue was asked of our leader Senator Eric Abetz, the Leader of the Government in the Senate. He was asked this question by Senator Wong: 'I refer to the Prime Minister's election commitment and his absolute assurance to the Australian people that this government would not make cuts to health and education.' It sounds very familiar. It is what we are talking about today. But the Labor opposition was not satisfied with yesterday's answer and they have brought the same issue back to the chamber today. The message will get through over time, I am sure.

Senator Abetz's contribution in response to Senator Wong's question was: 'This government has every intention of abiding by its election promises.' Could it be clearer? 'This government has every intention of abiding by its election promises.' Senator Abetz went on to say: 'It really does come as a shock to those opposite'—those in the Labor opposition—'that we can have a government in this country that has every intention of abiding by its election promises.' In relation to health and education, which we are talking about here this afternoon, we have said that the totality of the moneys made available in those portfolios would remain. What we have also said is that we will look at the quality of the spend in areas to ascertain whether money can be redirected and as a result get even better results but within the parameters of those two portfolio areas. We were very specific in relation to that. If I might go out on a limb, I think that Senator Moore might have heard the answer yesterday and that was part of her small concession this afternoon that we may actually be able to achieve better value for taxpayers' money without spending less. Senator Abetz did go on to say that the Labor opposition should be very cautious about judging us by their own standards.

So today we are talking about health and education cuts. I thought I might share the perspective of the previous government's health minister and bring to the Senate chamber some views, some learnings, that Senator Moore's esteemed Labor House colleague Nicola Roxon shared just recently at the John Button memorial address. This gives us a powerful insight.