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

Over eight months, Australians have seen that the Labor they voted for is not the Labor that is governing. We see continued efforts by Labor to deflect answers at question time. It doesn't want to answer the question. It doesn't want to take responsibility for anything that it has done. It clearly doesn't want to take responsibility for its broken promises.

Senator Birmingham asked a very legitimate question, given that during the lead-up to the election the then Opposition Leader and now Prime Minister made a promise that he wanted to see real wages continuing to increase. Australians have seen in eight short months that this is not going to happen, and there's now an admission by the government that it won't happen. It's just like the promise Labor made for the $275-a-year reduction in energy prices, which now will not pass the lips of any Labor member of parliament. That promise is gone. The empty and broken promises are now starting to pile up. In eight short months the broken promises are starting to pile up. I don't know how many times I heard Mr Albanese saying that he had a plan for the economy. It is becoming increasingly apparent that he has no plan for the economy, because every time something goes wrong, he says, 'We have to go out and talk to people.' He said he had a plan—there is no plan there to implement. There's absolutely no plan to implement.

As has been said earlier, cheaper child care is an important thing for the Australian economy, but not everyone has children and not everyone is reaping the benefit of that. But they are reaping the problem of increasing energy prices. I have to say, what we're looking forward to, what has been predicted out of the gas markets, for example—is a continuing increase in the price of gas. Because there will be less gas because of the intervention of the Labor Party. Only the Labor Party could spend a billion-and-a-half dollars to put gas prices up when they promised to bring them down. Only the Labor party could do that.

We're seeing the same things starting to emerge. It's the same old Labor: deflect the problem, use cute language, blame somebody else, blame the previous government, never take responsibility for anything that you've done yourself and, of course, when the questions get really hard descend into personal abuse. Start hurling abuse across the chamber. We see that so many times. How does that work in a post-Jenkins world in this place? It's not conducive to that sort of respect that the prime minister promised—a kinder parliament. Wasn't there a memo that went out? Was the Prime Minister the only one that got the memo? Did the other ministers in his government get the memo? They don't seem to be following it. Or is it just when someone's asking the Prime Minister a question that the memo applies? I reckon that's the case. Don't ask the Prime Minister any hard questions. Don't ask him about him keeping his promises: wages going up higher than inflation; cheaper power prices.

All we're seeing is the same old Labor. We all know—particularly those of us on this side—that Labor can't manage the economy. We've seen it time after time. We remember the pink batts. We remember the school halls. We remember the extraordinary spending that went on during the global financial crisis. We remember that Labor wanted us to spend $6 billion asking Australians to get vaccinated when all we had to do was to give them a good reason to get vaccinated—and they did, they turned out in their droves.

Here we have the same old Labor re-emerging, and it's mostly the same people from 2007-13. It's mostly the same people, and we're going to get the same results. We know that Labor can't handle the economy. They'll try to blame everybody else, they'll try to deflect, they'll try to abuse and they'll try to put it off on to someone else. But Labor we know. In 6,000 words we found out: they want to take economic policy back to the 1970s. They want to undo the reforms of Hawke and Keating that were so important in the last 30 years of economic prosperity in this country. It is the same old Labor. We shouldn't forget that. They won't keep their promises, they won't take responsibility for that and they won't own up.

Question agreed to.