Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure you will be much relieved, Acting Deputy President Bernardi, that it is now my time. I rise to respond to the address of the Governor-General and I note that it is the third time in three years that the Governor-General has come in here and delivered the Prime Minister's speeches for the nation, which tells a story in itself. It is an unusual time in political history but an important time for each and every one of us—I am speaking for myself here and no doubt for some of my colleagues. It is an opportunity to reflect on why we are here, what we want to achieve and what our legacy is going to be for our short time in parliament.

The story of what happened in Tasmania in the last three years and in the Tasmanian election is a story that I think needs more telling. I do not do this to gloat or to rub in the face of the Liberal Party the catastrophe that the 2016 double dissolution election was for them in Tasmania; I raise it because it tells a very important story about the 45th Parliament that we are going into. It concerns me that already within the first week of being back in here it is a bit like groundhog day—I feel like history is repeating already and that none of us have learned from the mistakes of the very volatile 44th Parliament.

A week into the double-dissolution election campaign, I did an interview with Brian Carlton from Tasmania Talks, down in Tasmania. At the end of the interview, he said to me, 'Senator, what is your call, what is your bet on the three amigos—the three Liberal MPs in Northern Tasmania?' I said, 'Brian, my call is that they are all going to lose their seats in a landslide.' He said, 'Senator, you would be the only one saying that.' Most of the polls at the time and the expectation on the street was that those electorates were going to be tightly contested and held by the Liberal Party. My reasoning was simple: I do not believe any of those three Liberal MPs in my state of Tasmania ever recovered from the 2014 budget.

The impression I got from speaking to constituents and from being on the ground was that the lack of vision and the cruel harsh budget cuts deeply impacted my electorate of Bass and the other northern electorates, which are some of the most disadvantaged electorates in the country—all the statistics tell us that; it is not something to be proud of and is something we have to work hard on. I felt and the constituents felt that that cruel, ideological budget of the Abbott Liberal government at the time was going to be devastating for many Tasmanians.

We had rallies and people spoke to their local members but what did they get back from their local members, including from my local member in Bass, Mr Andrew Nikolic? What they got told was that we needed to do this because we were in a budget emergency They got told that they were going to lose, that they were going to take cuts to their pensions and that they were going to lose entitlements on social security. They were told they would have to wait 12 months before they would get payments, that there were going to be cuts to health care and education because of a budget emergency. Well, it did not cut the mustard in Tasmania then and it will not now.

Fast forward to 2016 to this address of the Governor-General and the same thing is happening. We have a new Prime Minister who delivered his speech a couple of days ago through the Governor-General, which I must say was a total fizzer. I understand why Senator Hinch fell asleep. I think we all have to be honest with ourselves: most of us were employing every trick in the book to keep our eyes open during the speech. My trick was actually focusing on the Governor-General's aide-de-camp, who stood—