Senator RYAN (Victoria) (3:17 PM) —I almost feel sorry for the Manager of Government Business, Senator Ludwig, when he has to come here and defend this government’s management of the legislative program—that is, until he starts talking about the opposition. I think it was in the last session, in the days when the government was knifing the then Prime Minister, the member for Griffith, that this opposition facilitated the transaction of nearly two dozen pieces of legislation in almost a single Senate sitting day.
The mismanagement of this chamber falls squarely at the feet of this government. You cannot bring in reams of legislation in the last fortnight and expect them to be given due scrutiny. It may be easy to manage members on the other side, but on this side individual senators take their responsibility seriously. What we are truthfully seeing here, despite the rather half-hearted defence of the government by Senator Ludwig, is that this government has simply no agenda.
The only thing that holds this government together is the pursuit of power. Since being returned several weeks ago in what had to be the most humiliating and embarrassing judgment on a first-term government in seven decades, they have drifted from disaster to broken promise to backflip, and a lack of a legislative program indicates this. The contrived empathy that so encapsulated the former Prime Minister has now been replaced by the new Prime Minister with obfuscation and euphemism. The strict promise hours before polling day that there would be no carbon tax has been replaced by the euphemism of a so-called price on carbon, as if when the government collects a revenue from the consumer that it is somehow not a tax. Hours before polling day that promise was made, and hours after taking office the Prime Minister broke that promise and tried to justify it with an Orwellian euphemism.
The broken promises and backflips of the Labor Party cannot hide the fact that the Labor Party is nothing more than a decoy for the pursuit of power. There is no agenda; there is only a commitment to process absent of an outcome. The process itself has become important to this government in order to create the illusion of activity and the illusion of substance. We saw this today, when the Leader of the Government in this place said that the repeal of voluntary student unionism legislation was somehow meant to be taken as a sign of this government’s legislative agenda. Well, if that is your agenda for Australia then I am looking forward to the next election in this place.
The process has become an end in itself for the Labor Party. They simply aim to fill the pages of a newspaper and confect a sense of empathy with the Australian people. They constantly say, ‘We feel your pain,’ but they never actually want to commit to doing anything about it. We saw Fuelwatch, we saw GroceryWatch and we saw the illusion of health reform, but we did not see commitments that could actually be measured. Did any of them impact on fuel prices? No. Did any of them impact on grocery prices? No. They were contrived, confected and simply political stunts. The Prime Minister tries to create the illusion of substance. She makes speeches about reform as if uttering the word alone is enough to justify one’s existence in office. She calls upon the ghosts of Hawke and Keating for strength, but the comparison illustrates that she is really the successor to Rees, Keneally and Bligh—not only in the way in which she took office but also in that her only reason to be in office is to stay there.
The Prime Minister may like to talk about the Hawke and Keating governments and, in comparing this Labor Party to those, so do we. The Hawke and Keating governments, with the support of the opposition, undertook a reform program. They had an agenda. They actually undertook some tax reform, although they baulked at the end of indirect tax and left that for the coalition government and then opposed it. They reformed the Australian economy with the support of the opposition, yet the only things this government can commit to are to somehow increase the size of government and to impose a new tax without any consideration of reducing taxes on consumers in other ways.
You will remember, Mr Deputy President, as you were here, that when the coalition government put up its tax reform agenda there was a tax trade-off. When the previous Labor government, under Prime Minister Hawke, introduced superannuation, there was a wage-tax trade-off. This is the first government in decades in this country that has proposed new taxes to fill its deficit without any consideration of the burden that places on people or business and without any proposal to reduce the taxes people otherwise pay. People do not often speak of legislative programs; they are not always the first thing on people’s minds. But if they want to look at how empty this government’s soul is then they need to look at the fact that there is no serious legislation; there are only broken promises and the only thing the Leader of the Government in this place could say was that he wanted to make students pay compulsory union fees again.