Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak in the debate on the address-in-reply, not simply because I am following Senator Simms and it gives me an opportunity to rebut some of the interesting interpretations of the Greens' policy and other assessments of government policy but also to recognise that we are I think in a unique circumstance in this country. We are in a circumstance where I think on only four times in the last century or so has the parliament been prorogued in the manner in which it has. We are heading towards a double-dissolution election in the new financial year. It is an opportunity to provide a very clear choice between the tired old politics, the crusty politics, of the past that we saw under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, however many there were, and the new approach of redressing the imbalance—the fiscal imbalance, the social and emotional imbalance—that is so endemic and inflicted upon the Australian people by the left side of politics.

I know the Labor Party is in full and complete denial about their role in the machinations that have gone on that have so discredited politics in this country, the accumulation of hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of debt which is sentencing our children to a lifetime of servitude, if you will, to repay the excesses of the past. Who out there is celebrating the fact that the Labor Party spent tens of billions of dollars on school halls when there is much-needed infrastructure. If you wanted to spend that sort of money you could have got something more substantive, that was going to grow and develop our economy, because that would provide jobs for the future. You could have built water pipelines to assist in the fertility of the soil and the growing of crops for export or domestic consumption. You could have looked at very fast rail networks to improve the ease and speed of transport, to ease congestion in places like Sydney by perhaps extending a rail network through to Canberra. There are any number of things that could have been done had the minds been open, but of course they are not. Those on that side of politics only think through the prism of self-interest: their own self-interest and the interests of the unions, how they can coerce power and increasing influence and dominance in those sort of collectivism ideals and the collective ideals.

I am here to say that the great socialist experiment of the last 70 or 80 years is failing. It is failing before our eyes. It is an absolute disaster and a debacle. We have a circumstance where about half the people in this country are dependent on the toil of the other half. It is simply not sustainable. If we listen to those on the other side of politics and in the Greens party, the half that is dependent will become even greater. It will become 55 per cent or 60 per cent or 65 per cent or 70 per cent, because they want government to be the conduit of everything into people's lives. They want the working masses to become economic units to provide taxes for their largesse. That is the shame of it. They are indoctrinating our youth, those who are responsible for the future of our country, in a manner which is almost unprecedented. It was said many, many decades ago that the Left are going to proceed with their long march through the institutions. We are seeing that.

Senator Simms in his contribution talked about the Safe Schools program. It sounds so lovely and light, 'Safe Schools'. It is about safe schools. It is an anti-bullying program. What Senator Simms neglected to mention is that it is an indoctrination of our youth into a circumstance they are not ready for. They are getting 12-year-olds and sending them to websites, encouraging them to bypass school filters to access websites which link to third-party websites which deliberately encourage them to enter into bondage parties or to visit sex stores. And these people opposite are in denial about it. The author of the Safe Schools program is an avowed Marxist who said that gender—