Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

The question before the chamber at the moment is:

That the Senate acknowledges that it has a responsibility to propose and discuss options to cut government spending.

The proposition of course is one that all governments at some point or another in their time do have to consider. But there are many others that have to be considered as well in that context, and the concern that I have about such a statement is of course that it misrepresents the complexities of the way in which public finances have to be administered, and it underplays the importance that parliament has in terms of maintaining public confidence in the direction of the country.

It is one thing to talk about responsible economic management, and all governments of course do use that frame, but it is another thing entirely to go to an election and tell a pack of lies—to go to an election and say: 'We can undertake certain courses of action without cutting the budget.' That is exactly what this government has done. It went to the last election and explicitly said that, whatever programs it had, there would be no cuts to education, there would be no cuts to health and there would be no cuts to the ABC, and a range of other commitments were made. Apart from the fact that governments that do that sort of thing invariably get caught out as being liars—

Senator Back interjecting—

There is no doubt about it—there is just absolutely no doubt about what this government has done: it has betrayed the Australian people, and the betrayal is real enough. But there is a more fundamental problem, and that is that, within this country—and I think this is common in many other countries as well, so it is not just confined to this country—there is a drop in public confidence in the authority of government, of the state; there is an undermining of the legitimacy of the democratic process; there is a capacity to turn people away from the political process itself. That, to me, undermines some fundamental democratic principles. It undermines the capacity of governments to actually talk to people about issues that are facing the country. It undermines the capacity of politicians to be trusted.

This Prime Minister we have now, Mr Abbott, made a great virtue of the issue of trust, in the last parliament. It was a central point in his assault upon the previous Labor government. And there were some very, very derogatory things said about the leadership of the last Labor government.