Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You'd almost think that the Labor Party don't really want to debate the motion that they've just moved before the Senate. To be frank, given some of the activities of the last 24 hours and some of the briefings that are coming out from the Labor Party, I have to say I am starting to feel the ghosts of Labor past return from the Rudd-Gillard years, where 'policy turmoil' and 'policy implementation turmoil' were basically the buzzwords of how the Labor Party operated. The Labor Party try to talk about fairness, but I don't think they really understand what fairness is. They come in here and misrepresent numbers—they talk about a $65 billion tax cut to big business—and yet the background briefing is that they're going to back in the $30 billion of tax cuts that have already been passed for businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million a year; that's already done. We're now talking about a process in front of the parliament at the moment for $35 billion, but they can't go past the old talking points that continue with the $65 billion. Here we have something that the Leader of the Opposition furiously opposed last year in this place. But now, reportedly, the Labor Party are going to support it.

We had the Labor Party's retirees' tax, which was introduced, or announced, a couple of weeks ago. I think it was described by the opposition spokesperson for Treasury matters, Mr Bowen, as a policy that was well designed and well thought through—I think he even admitted a few weeks ago that it was going to hit pensioners. But we have here today a backflip from the Labor Party. Their current policy, which was going to raise them billions of dollars, hasn't lasted a fortnight. They claimed a couple of weeks ago that this policy was well organised, well thought through, well designed and fair. But perhaps it's not fair. I find it quite interesting that they continue to talk about fairness all the time, because I don't think they really do understand what fairness means and I don't think they really do understand what good policy development is. Quite frankly, I'm not sure what Bill Shorten really does believe. Back in 2011, Bill Shorten said—