Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

If the Australian people weren't alarmed enough, Senator Hinch has sent a shiver—a horror—through all of their spines by mentioning 'Prime Minister Pyne'. It conjures dread through the country to think not only has our political system become a bit of a laughing stock but that such thoughts could be taken seriously—or even with remote seriousness—in this place.

I perfectly understand why Senator Wong has moved this motion of no confidence. If you look at the government's track record it has been dreadful to say the least. Not only have they refused to deal with some of the issues that need to be dealt with; they've messed around with people's superannuation, they've run a chaotic and dysfunctional government, and they've thrown everything up in the air and said, 'It's on the table', which basically means they've got no firm principles and no framework in which to discount even the most idiotic proposals. We've had a government that has been committed to emissions trading schemes. They've snuck them through. They've discussed a tax on car emissions and a tax on lawnmowers and two-stroke engines. We've got a year's worth of national electricity guarantee work that was abandoned under the face of a bit of a pressure. We've got money being sent off to bodies without enough scrutiny: $444 million to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. We've got hundreds of millions of dollars shipped off to the Clinton Foundation and the United Nations. There is the signing up to the Paris agreement. You can go through the litany of failures of this government. It's why I'm no longer part of the Liberal Party. That judgement was one that I made, because I couldn't go along with it.

The base politics of moving a no confidence motion is very straightforward, and every failure on this side is repeated on the other side of the chamber. They've done worse: they've knifed two prime ministers; at the moment, the Liberal Party has only knifed one. They've got bigger emissions trading targets. They want to outsource more of Australian sovereignty to international organisations. They want, basically, an open border policy. We know they're going to tax and spend. They're going to tinker with and work harder against people's superannuation again. They're going to change capital gains tax. They're going to overturn negative gearing, which is a principle of business, and they cannot tell you whether they're going to apply it to commercial property, to share transactions or to residential property. We know that half of them have sold out to China, but we also know that that's happened on this side as well.

What politics has become is shameful. It's a crisis. You can look around the place and you can ask the Australian people, and they speak with their votes: about 30 or 40 per cent of people now are voting outside the major parties. That is where the vote of no confidence is coming from. I regret that that has allowed some base opportunism to spring up—people in positions of influence wielding their power for their personal gratification and to aggrandise and big-note themselves rather than do something that is in the best interests of the country.

On that side, they say they want to spend $40 billion on education; on this side, it was $18 billion on education—all unfunded and all uncosted, and there are no educational outcomes available for it. What did the crossbench do? They said, '$18 billion isn't enough; let's put another $5 billion of borrowed money into it.' However you want to look at the decision-making that has been taking place in the last decade of parliament, it is no wonder the Australian people are losing faith and confidence in the body politic.

We are all guilty of it, to a degree. We will all complain about the other team. But the people we are letting down are the Australian people. There are the mums and dads who are finding it difficult to pay their utility bills. Every problem in the electricity market is caused by government interference, government determinations and government regulations—every single one. Every time an Australian person can't afford to pay their electricity bills, we should be hanging our heads in shame. It is because of blind ideology, and this was as forecastable as anything.

So was the crisis that is engulfing the Liberal Party now. The move against Tony Abbott, three or so years ago, was textbook—a textbook repetition of the same failures and the same damage that was done by the Labor Party in getting rid of Kevin Rudd. It doesn't matter whether Kevin Rudd was a dysfunctional human being or whether Tony Abbott was a good Prime Minister.

Senator Gallacher interjecting—

You know that's true, Senator Gallacher. In the end, the Australian people have come to expect that the person they elect to be their Prime Minister would at least see out a term. That has been the convention, and when you dump convention you dump the integrity of the system, and that is what we've done. The people on the Liberal side of the chamber who orchestrated and participated in that coup should be hanging their heads in shame. They thought, 'We can take Labor's policy and somehow make it turn out better.' Well, what they did was that they took Labor's policy, essentially took Labor's rejected candidate—because, let's remember, Mr Turnbull lined up there with Graham Richardson and others, seeking Labor preselection, and they said, 'No; we've got enough narcissists in our party already'—so he made his migration across to the coalition, where he has systemically sought to reshape it and change it in his image, which is not the traditional Liberal Party image.

I say to the Australian people: like it or lump it, this mob or that mob, the red team or the blue team, are going to be running a government of some sort after the next election. The choice for you is who is going to influence and shape the outcomes: who in this place can be trusted to put the Australian people's interests first rather than naked political opportunism first. You can only look around the crossbench and ask who has acted, in every vote, with principle—not with shameless self-aggrandisement or political opportunism or something to extract a boast about—who is seeking to improve legislation, voting on either side of the chamber according to the merits of it? I will say that I'm not the only who's endeavoured to do that; there are others in this chamber as well.

But we cannot let down the Australian people through these shameless acts of partisanship. The only ones who are being let down are the Australian people, who once had faith in this institution, who once had confidence that the people up here were actually going to act in their interests. It's time for that to happen again. The font of all wisdom and knowledge is not vested in this place. We have to think that the Australian people can make some determinations and decisions for themselves. That is the challenge for us: rather than getting government out of people's lives—because we haven't improved it at all in the past 10 years—we need to have a very light touch on their lives so that they can make these decisions themselves.

Quite frankly, as I'm not a personal fan of the Prime Minister, I do believe that ultimately these things should be handled at the ballot box for Prime Minister. It is an indictment on this place, as Senator Hinch said, that Italy looks like the paragon of political stability now. We haven't had a Prime Minister since John Howard who has actually lasted a full term after their election. That is a reflection on each and every one of us, people who have participated in the games to bring down successive prime ministers. I know we relish it when it's on the other side, but I look here from the crossbench and I say that it's a shame. It's a shame for all of us. It's a shame for the Australian people. I won't be supporting this no-confidence motion, because I do understand that it's base politics. And as I said in my opening remarks, whatever the errors of this side, they've only ever been reflected or compounded—sometimes even exceeded—by the errors of the other side. I'm not going to support a motion that has what I regard as political intent and is based around hypocrisy.