Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw that. The Prime Minister said, 'If you have a go, you'll get a go.' Well, this is the Prime Minister's 21st go over eight years at getting climate and energy policy right and we're seeing the consequences. Just like a kid who campaigns against the HSC for all of their period in high school and then suddenly starts studying for the exams in the last two days, this Prime Minister, this coalition, is falling apart at the Glasgow hurdle, and now we've got the Glasgow gaslighting show. It's a pantomime that's been constructed to try and get the Prime Minister through the next two weeks and then through to the election. It is the worst pantomime in Australian theatrical history, with the least compelling cast.

It has some problems, this shift to net zero from the Prime Minister. Like Mr Morrison, it is fake. Like Mr Morrison, it is a fraud. And, like Mr Morrison, it is all marketing and no substance, because he is a man who believes in nothing. There is zero credibility in this switch to net zero. In the review of this pantomime, let's deal with problem 1: the National Party. Plot credibility for this pantomime requires that they pretend to fight for some regional interest. The fighters for the squatters and the pastoralists have decayed and deteriorated into a bunch of jumped-up bunyip aristocracy who fight for property developers, real estate agents, water speculators and spivs and who couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. That's the problem. This whole plot rests on the idea that the National Party could fight—and they couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. I wish we had some heavy hitters. There's no Reg Withers. There's no Doug Anthony. There's no Peter Nixon. There's no Ian Sinclair.

When you look at them, what a bunch of pathetic specimens they are. There is Senator Canavan. He wouldn't make an impression on a feather bed. He is a former KPMG guy, a former pseudo-economist and ministerial staffer. He dresses up in the high-vis, puts on the make-up and pretends to be a coalminer. There is Senator McKenzie. All we've seen is whingeing and whining and back-stabbing and leaking and moaning. But we haven't seen any fighting, and we haven't seen any delivery. The best way you can assess future performance is, of course, on past performance. Of course, the only thing that we have seen as a policy proposal from this decaying carcass of a once-great political party has been from Minister Pitt, who proposed a $250 billion line of credit—$10,000 dollars of public money for every man, woman and child in Australia—that would be allocated to an industry that doesn't want it. Senator Canavan, who has enough memory of economics 101, told us that it would have such a distortionary effect on the Australian economy that it would put up interest rates—and he said that was a good thing—lifting mortgage costs, lifting business costs and pushing jobs overseas. That's what we've had from the National Party.

Problem 2, of course, is the Prime Minister, who's a fraud, a phoney and a fake. He wants to say one thing in Glasgow, another thing in Gunnedah and something entirely different in Glen Waverley. He wants a credible position for Glasgow and he wants to go and say something completely different in Gladstone. Then he'll sneak back to Sydney and try to convey to people in New South Wales that he has a serious message on climate change in Georges Hall. You can't spend 10 years sucking up to climate sceptics, science deniers and cranks and then expect that you can execute a complete U-turn on climate and energy policy. How many jobs has this cost? How much has it cost ordinary families? This is a fraud, a phoney and a fake and it has been seen for what it is. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.