Senator RYAN (Victoria) (4:13 PM) —Where to begin? If only eight minutes were enough. It is not going to be, but I am sure my colleague Senator Back will follow it up. I will move onto what we have just heard soon. What we see from the Labor Party is an attempt at all costs to avoid a discussion of their own record. Let me just go over a few of Labor’s broken promises. There are many; I do not have time to cover them all. In February 2008 the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said, ‘The private heath insurance rebate policy remains unchanged and will remain unchanged.’ That did not last the year as the government walked back on that promise and sought to means test the private health insurance rebate. I would like to point out, Senator Hurley, that it was a promise in writing from the shadow minister for health to the Australian Health Insurance Association. But it was not a promise which the government kept.
In November 2007 at the Labor Party campaign launch—you cannot think of another time where there was probably more national attention on the then Leader of the Opposition—the then Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, said, ‘We have no plans to make any other changes to the way the baby bonus is structured either in terms of eligibility or payment methods.’ Yet again, that did not last the first budget. Six months later the then Prime Minister and the then Treasurer stood up and tried to confect an excuse to break that explicit promise again. They are just two of the meaningful promises.
Then we move to the ridiculous: the ridiculous promise for a citizens assembly, the national focus group on climate change organised by Mark Arbib and probably moderated by Karl Bitar. Most people thought they were going through an election at the time to actually elect what we call a citizens assembly, our national parliament; but no, that ridiculous promise by the then Prime Minister—
Senator Polley —Madam Deputy President, on a point of order: the senator should be referring to other senators in this chamber by their correct title.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Boyce)—That is a correct point of order, Senator Ryan. Please do so.
Senator RYAN —The current Prime Minister promised a citizens assembly, a promise that was laughed at all around the country.
Senator Williams —A harebrained idea.
Senator RYAN —An absolutely harebrained idea, Senator Williams. It was ridiculous. But here we have the killer. Here we have the excuse that cannot be run away from: ‘There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.’ At least someone is going to come in here and admit that the Prime Minister is not leading this government, which some suspect and, I am sure from occasional grins down the other end of this chamber, some of us suspect on more than one ground.
This was a promise that had no qualification. There was no ‘unless’, there was no ‘if’, there was no ‘but’, there was no ‘maybe’ and there was no ‘except’. This was an explicit promise. You cannot run away from video footage. It is there on You Tube. It has been played tens of thousands of times as Australians know that this government is simply trying to obfuscate. This was an unqualified, explicit promise intended to deceive. And there are two reasons we know this—because the government is using many excuses now to try and run away from this. You heard the Prime Minister last week saying, ‘But we always spoke about a carbon price.’ If this is not a euphemism for a tax—which it has been used for in this context—it is being used either to justify a broken promise or as an admission that the promise in the first place was deceitful. When the Prime Minister says, ‘I might have said no tax but I said we would have a carbon price,’ that is an admission of the very deceit that you are being accused of right now.
Then we hear the argument about the new parliament, the parliament where one or two members of the House of Representatives, the place that forms government, campaign on the carbon tax but the leaders of both major parties actually outline how there would not be one. This is code for honesty being no price for power, that there is nothing the modern Labor Party would not sell in order to stay sitting on the right hand side of this chamber. But does it mean the Greens run the show? Is this an admission that to stay sitting to the right of the Speaker the Prime Minister had to actually give the Greens and Senator Brown what they asked for?
We do not have a European style democracy here where the people get to vote for a party list and then the decisions are taken by party leaders behind closed doors. We have a voting system in the House of Representatives that gives people the power to choose who represents them, yet we have a Prime Minister coming in and saying afterwards: ‘A very explicit promise I made days before an election, decided by fewer than 2,000 votes in a couple of seats, does not count. The election was close.’ In fact, that betrays the very purpose behind her speaking those words because Labor always has an excuse.
In 2008 we heard more about the inflation dragon. Who remembers the inflation dragon—the inflation genie, as the then Treasurer also called it? This was the excuse to justify broken promises on health insurance, on the baby bonus, because apparently inflation was the biggest problem. But by 2009, a year after everyone else in the world, they realised they had to find another excuse and here it became the GFC. The GFC was the excuse for everything, the excuse for broken promises again on private health insurance when it was put up again and the excuse to go nowhere near any remote attempt at achieving a balanced budget. Now we have the hung parliament as an excuse. I am not sure whether the Prime Minister wants us to blame the Greens or to blame her, but the truth we have now is that we simply have another excuse.
The elephant in the room is Labor’s honesty. In the vain hope that people forget what this Prime Minister said word for word, they are just following the Labor play book. We saw it with Bob Carr and no tolls in 1995. We saw it with Steve Bracks and no tolls in 2002. You hope that people are going to forget.
Senator McLucas —And no GST.
Senator RYAN —That went to an election. I will take that interjection, Senator McLucas. I dare you to take this to an election. You will not. You are hoping that the people forget. You will wear this like a ball and chain. You are scared, and that is why you are talking more about the opposition than your own agenda. You can tell when Labor is scared. You see it in New South Wales now. You saw it in Victoria with John Brumby last November. When Labor talks about the opposition rather than itself, you know it is running scared. The ghost of Julia past will haunt the present and the future of this government, and those words will ring in people’s ears until the next election day.
I briefly move on to the issue of debt and deficit, which was so blithely dismissed by a previous speaker from the government side. I grew up in the 1990s in Victoria in the aftermath of Cain and Kirner, the intellectual and spiritual forebears of the current New South Wales Labor government and the recession that we had to have, told to us by the then Treasurer, Paul Keating. But debt and deficits are nothing less than deferred taxation. The ultimate irony of the BER is that the kids in those very school facilities are going to pay higher taxes and have fewer opportunities in their working years to pay back the debt that funded those facilities. This government is guaranteeing higher taxes and fewer opportunities for future Australians. If anyone in this country could not think of a better way to spend $16 billion on our education system, then they are not trying. Ill-designed, shabbily built school halls that take over playgrounds are not education reform.
You can use the word ‘revolution’ all you want so it sounds fancy—that has nothing to do with education—and your defence is that it was stimulus. It is still being spent now. The Reserve Bank is putting up interest rates and you are still spending stimulus. It shows you how farcical this was and the defence is to say that only three per cent of projects had a problem. I remember when a few hundred million dollars was serious money and the only defence this government can come up with is that it had to shovel the money out the door so quickly you would expect a few hundred million to be wasted. This side of the chamber takes its responsibilities much more seriously.