Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi, of course, left the Liberal Party in February 2017. He said at the time that it was because he thought there was an irredeemable political force dominating the Liberal Party. Today, he told us that Malcolm Turnbull was, in fact, Labor's Prime Minister. If he had been a little more patient, he may well have discovered that he would be part of that coalition that now dominates the Liberal Party. He would find that the positions he complained so bitterly about would in fact become the dominant view of this government—that is, an intense hostility to modernity and a contempt for the modern world in many respects. He may well have found that if he'd just had that little bit more patience he would have got a prime minister who doesn't actually believe in climate change and who doesn't actually believe in the importance of science. He would have had a Minister for Energy who has demonstrated his intense hostility to the need for action to be taken to support Australian industry in terms of understanding our role within the world.

What we've got here is a proposition before us—and I see that the government now finds that it has to compete with the governments of Brazil and other such places in condemning energy companies as worse than banks. It has been said on many occasions that there need to be interventions, the like of which South American regimes of various stripes would blush at. But, of course, this is all coming from a free-marketeer government that is so desperate, faced with the prospect of its falling public support, that it has to seek out these various measures to change what has been a fundamental policy failure now for well over 10 years. It's a policy failure that has seen this country crippled when it comes to dealing with one of these great issues that confront this parliament in terms of the future of the nation in regard to energy, in regard to energy prices and in regard to climate change. These are the great moral questions, the great economic questions and the great social questions that have confounded government after government. Despite the very best efforts of various elements in this parliament to reach out to try to get a bipartisan approach on these questions, we've not been able to secure that simply because there are a group of people in this parliament who are so reactionary and so hostile to the modern world that they refuse to engage in anything other than running banal advertisements on TV.

We saw them throughout the football finals last year—the so-called 'Powering Forward' campaign, which claimed that the government had now improved affordability, reliability and sustainability in the national energy market. They spent $9.3 million to do that. They're doing it again during this football finals season, asserting, again, that they have suddenly turned the corner and achieved great change as a result of the miraculous rejection of everything they've stood for throughout the last 12 months. They're still aiming to run these quite disgraceful advertisements at some $300,000 every 60 seconds, seeking to persuade football enthusiasts that something is actually happening in this country on the question of climate change.

What we saw month, after month, after month was the government claiming that they had the answer with the National Energy Guarantee, only for them to abandon it. Then the Prime Minister they so despised had to be removed—a Prime Minister who described himself as a 'progressive' in his exit interview, a word we haven't heard for a while. They replaced the former energy minister, Mr Frydenberg, with a new energy minister, Mr Angus Taylor, who was described as 'mad and morally irresponsible', according to Liberal moderates. They suggested that the position the government had adopted as a result of Mr Morrison's complete capitulation to the spineless attitude of this government when it comes to dealing with fundamental issues confronting this country was nothing more than 'morally irresponsible' and 'mad'.

This position was reflected not just by Labor governments but by the government in New South Wales. Senior Liberal figures were dismayed at the direction the Morrison administration had adopted in regard to energy policy, and they were concerned at the appointment of Mr Taylor, who, as I said, had campaigned against wind farms and renewable energy subsidies. But, of course, he had declared that the energy companies were in fact worse than the banks. What was their response to this? We'll have a royal commission. But will we look at the issue of privatisation, of deregulation? Will we look at the effect that government policies have had on the capacity of these companies to take advantage of their market power? Of course not. What we'll do is find a device by which we can distract people in the hope that they can somehow or other, as Senator Molan just told us, 'rebuild credibility and trust with the community'.

Well, we saw the results of that this morning in the opinion polls. We saw the result of a party, once again, seeking to remove the leader because he couldn't satisfy them. No matter how craven Mr Turnbull was when it came to attempting to satisfy the knuckle draggers and shellbacks of the Liberal Party, no matter how extraordinarily despicable he was in his attitude, he could never ever satisfy them. So, of course, he had to be replaced with Mr Morrison, who was egging him on all the time, suggesting he should call a spill and take them by surprise. Then—surprise, surprise—who ends up as the beneficiary? Mr Morrison, who could then say: 'I did it without any blood on my hands. I had no blood on my hands whatsoever.'

Mr Morrison can put his baseball cap on. He can shoehorn himself into the latest commentary at the Sharks. Of course, he's a fairly recent convert to that football club in Sydney. He had a bit of trouble in Melbourne, where he doesn't quite understand the culture, when he introduced himself to the punters there and got asked the question, 'Who are you?' 'I'm ScoMo,' he said, expecting that everyone would immediately pick up this marketing device as being the answer to the fundamental failure in policy, which is the current situation.

What has the Liberal Party done? They've produced yet another change in the government and, for the first time in recent history, they've not been able to produce a post-spill poll boost. The outcome of all their deliberations, all their manoeuvrings, all their backstabbing and all their bitterness and strife has been to actually go backwards still further. So this is how they are going about rebuilding credibility and trust with the community. They won't deal with the substantive policy questions that are actually required in this country. They think that you can secure the confidence of the public as a marketing exercise by putting on a baseball cap and strutting around the back streets of marginal electorates and pretending to people that they're doing things when, of course, they're not. Having told people for months that if the NEG was not delivered there would be a price increase for electricity and that if there was an implementation of the NEG there would be a lowering of prices of some $300, all of that has been thrown away as a result of the change of heart over this last weekend.

As the former Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, made the point, the coalition simply can't get it right when it comes to these fundamental issues because they have no real esprit de corps about those fundamental questions, about why they are actually here. What is the point of the Liberal Party when it comes to the future of this country? They have lost sight of that basic premise, and we will see after the election just where that takes them. (Time expired)