Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't it fantastic when the opposition quotes Robert Menzies? In fact, I think about two minutes of a five-minute speech was taken up by quoting the great man himself. From a Liberals' perspective, of course, that's a wonderful thing. We love quoting Robert Menzies because we are so proud of the history of our party. We're so proud of everything that our side of politics has achieved in our past but we're also proud of what we're achieving today and what we are going to achieve in the future. And it is good hearts and sound minds, just like those of John Pesutto, the former member for Hawthorn—and I'm very glad to see that you have also quoted him today, Senator Kitching—that will take us forward to that grand future that has a vision as wonderful as does our illustrious past.

Our energy policy, as anybody on the other side would know if they had been listening, has in fact been bringing prices down. It has been bringing prices down for the last—what? Years or months? I'm not entirely sure what it is now. The coalition has said from day one that it is committed to bringing power prices down and has already taken significant actions to do exactly that. You will recall that the first action that we took on coming to government was to abolish the carbon tax—the heinous carbon tax—introduced by the former government.