Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I will take the interjection, and thank you for providing me with something to respond to, Senator Williams, in the circumstances. I understand that parties of government on occasion have, when they are faced with a circumstance where they cannot get legislation through at the end of a session, sought to have agreed limitation of debate motions—they have; I acknowledge that. But it is quite a different thing to do it on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the first sitting week of the new Senate. The only logical reason the government has done this, as I said, is that it wanted to make sure Mr Abbott could have his press conference.

Why does Mr Abbott want a press conference today on this? You can see what has happened. As I said in the debate earlier today, this is a government that has turned on the people who elected it. It is a government that promised no cuts to education, no cuts to health and no changes to the pension, and it has broken all of those promises. This budget breaks all of those promises and many more: they have broken the promise around no cuts to the ABC, no cuts to SBS but, most importantly, no cuts to health and no cuts to education—a fundamental promise that Mr Abbott made not once, not twice but over and over and over again during the election campaign. Then they bring down a budget and completely turn their back on the commitments they made to the Australian people, because it is a budget which does cut health and education. It cuts our school system by around $30 billion. It cuts our health system by $50 billion and of course it imposes a GP tax and the tax on fuel—from the party that believes in lower taxes.

This is the context to why the government has gone to such lengths this week to curtail debate—to contain debate—though it did so unsuccessfully on a number of occasions. What they want is for Mr Abbott to be able to stand up at the Prime Minister's press conference today and say, 'I've repealed the carbon price, but let's not talk about the budget where we did you over.' That is what this is all about.

I want to return now to a couple of the points in the legislation and the amendments that Labor have moved. I note that on a number of occasions, Senator Abetz and Senator Cormann have waved around comments that Labor made prior to the election about the ending of the carbon tax. The Leader of the Government in the Senate seems not to understand Labor policy. We made very clear our position, which is that we think the fixed price policy needs to end. We do want to move to a market mechanism. We do want to move to a floating price. The amendments that I have just moved—the amendments that Senator Singh has circulated—and that we are debating are fundamentally about Labor's policy position, which is that we should move to emissions trading.

Let us recall the sorts of people who are on the side of emissions trading. They include John Howard, Mr Hewson, Mr Turnbull, Margaret Thatcher's cabinet minister and many other members of conservative parties around the world. The reason is that an emissions trading scheme is a market mechanism. I will take Senator Cormann's point in the earlier debate—when he was doing his interesting filibuster in a guillotine debate—where he said that an emissions trading scheme is not a market mechanism. That is the most ridiculous proposition. Who sets the price? The market. That is the point. You set a cap on pollution and—