Mr ABBOTT (Warringah—Minister for Health and
Ageing) (3.52 p.m.) — On behalf of members on this
side of the House, I congratulate the Leader of the Opposition
on his elevation. But I do make the observation,
having just listened to his speech, that I have to
conclude that having got to the position of Leader of
the Opposition he now does not have a clue about what
he is going to do with his new eminence. Except for
the vitriol against the Prime Minister and the coalition
parties and except for the idolatry of Gough Whitlam
and Labor, the leader of conceivably any political party
could have made the speech that the Leader of the Opposition
has just made—except I say this: no leader of
a coalition party would ever make a speech so cliched,
so fatuous and so utterly devoid of any serious content
as that which the Leader of the Opposition has just
made.
The Leader of the Opposition is better than that. The
Leader of the Opposition has spent years developing
hard positions on difficult topics, and now it seems he
has got to the top job and he is terrified of his own
shadow. There was not a single concrete proposal or a
single decent idea from the Leader of the Opposition in
that speech. What has happened to him? He talks about
rewarding effort. He talks about ending poverty. He
talks about looking forward. He talks about being our
best selves. Well, wacky do—all of us believe in that.
If that is the best the Leader of the Opposition can do
after all these years of scheming, dreaming and plotting,
I say: bring back the member for Hotham. If that
is the best the Leader of the Opposition can do, bring
back the member for Brand. Bring back anyone, because
no-one else in this House would have had the
temerity to insult our intelligence with that wish list we
have just had from the Leader of the Opposition.
I think quite a few people on this side of the House
were a little apprehensive when the Leader of the Opposition
assumed his position on Tuesday. But we
should not have been, because quite frankly he has
been the de facto Leader of the Opposition for the last
six months anyway. He has been the chief policy
maker as shadow Treasurer, and he has been the chief
tactician as Manager of Opposition Business. We have
already seen the result of six months of de facto opposition
leadership from the member for Werriwa. It was
so poor that the member for Hotham lost his job. The
member for Werriwa should have lost his job, not the
member for Hotham, on the basis of the pathetically
inadequate wish list we have just heard from the member
for Werriwa.
The Leader of the Opposition tried the oldest trick in
the book and accused the government of having no
ideas. This very week the government has made major
announcements about saving the Great Barrier Reef.
This very day the government has made a significant
announcement about joining a ballistic missile defence
program. That is just this week. What about the big
difference that this government has made to the economic,
social and cultural architecture of this country?
What about tax reform—something that was too hard
for members opposite? What about industrial relations
reform, which the member for Werriwa believes in but
now lacks the guts to advocate? What about the liberation
of East Timor and those poor, oppressed people
who had suffered from 500 years of colonialism, first
at the hands of the Portuguese and later at the hands of
the Indonesians? This government gave them their
freedom. Regarding border protection, the member for
Werriwa talks about being tough on queuejumpers.
This government has delivered that. Then there is Work
for the Dole. The member for Werriwa talks about giving
people a fair go and a chance to show not what
they cannot do but what they can do. This government
has delivered that through Work for the Dole—and of
course we have been opposed every step of the way by
the member for Werriwa and his cohorts.
This government is not obsessed with the past, although
we do think we should learn from it, and we do
think it is important to look at the past and the present
and hold the new Leader of the Opposition accountable.
I can understand why the new opposition leader
does not want to dwell on the past. It is because,
frankly, it embarrasses him—and it should embarrass
him. There is so much political inconsistency, so much
political treachery and so much betrayal of ideas, people
and institutions that he was pledged to support.
This MPI was supposed to be about health, education
and community services. In the old days, before
the Leader of the Opposition became anaesthetised by
success, he actually had a few views. This is what he
said about private health insurance:
This is the maddest piece of public policy that one will ever
see out of the Commonwealth parliament.
I bet you he supports it now. This is what he used to
say about safety nets:
The methodology of good health reform is to get effective
public safety net provisions in place ...
That is what this government is doing in health. This
very day, the Leader of the Opposition had a chance to
vote in favour of a strong, effective, necessary and
timely MedicarePlus safety net, but what did he do? He
ratted on his own principles, as he has so often done in
the past. If we go back a bit, he talked about heroin
injecting rooms. He said:
I would think it’s just common sense to have heroin addicts
in a controlled environment where there’s proper supervision
...
Yes, but not a jail. He wants there to be injecting
rooms—coming to a suburb near you.
On education he had nothing at all to say today except
empty platitudes and cliches. Once upon a time,
before he was anaesthetised by success, he was prepared
to take a tough position on universities. He said:
It is possible to envisage ... different types of resourcing.
He then said one type could be:
A group of internationally focussed institutions, with a
greater emphasis on private revenue sources than public
money.
He said of these elite universities:
Their fees would be deregulated, with the equity role of government
pursued through publicly funded, means tested
scholarships.
And he identified these universities that should be deregulated.
They were Queensland, New South Wales,
Macquarie, Melbourne, Monash, Adelaide and Western
Australia. Come on—support a decent policy. Support
deregulation of the elite universities. Have the courage
of your convictions. Do not just engage in opposition
for opposition’s sake, and pass the government’s higher
education bill.
In the days when he had a policy and held a view
and had not lost his guts, the Leader of the Opposition
had some interesting things to say. On community services
and reforming the disability support pension, for
instance, he said then that the disability support pension
was being used as a way of shifting people off the
dole and ‘artificially lowering the unemployment rate’.
He said that some experts believe that the size of the
program should be no more than 150,000. Back then,
before he was anaesthetised by success, before he was
neutered by his elevation, he wanted 400,000 Australians
to be thrown off the disability support pension. I
say to the Leader of the Opposition: come on, have a
conviction, have some courage, have a policy. If you
think you were going a bit too far back then, just adopt
the modest policy position which the government is
putting to the Senate of trying to slightly moderate,
slightly limit, the ability of people to move onto the
disability pension and take what you once used to call
‘early retirement’.
In days gone by, the Leader of the Opposition had
an opinion on everything but a policy on nothing; now
he has a cliche on everything but a policy on nothing.
Where does the Leader of the Opposition really stand?
He says he is in favour of the US alliance, but he calls
President George W. Bush the most flaky President, the
most dangerous and incompetent President, in living
memory. He gets into a bit of trouble in this House, so
what does he do? He runs out and wraps himself spinelessly
and cravenly in the flag of a country that he has
spent the last 12 months criticising and excoriating.
He says—or at least he used to say, before this
week—that he wants to see lower taxes for highincome
earners. But of course he opposed those selfsame
tax cuts when they were before the Senate. Then
there are his particularly batty ideas: the betterment tax
on local residents, because the council has done something
for them; the regional GST, where you pay GST
on one side of the street but not on the other side of the
street; and the progressive expenditure tax, which has
been tried nowhere and which not even academics understand
but which the Leader of the Opposition has
adopted. Then there is the ‘homework police’ that he
wanted to see interfering in the houses of his own electorate
because he did not believe that the parents in his
electorate were capable of doing a good job. This
might be all very well from an undergraduate or an
overpromoted policy adviser, but it sits very ill indeed
in the mouth and the books of someone who is now
presenting himself as the alternative Prime Minister of
this country.
What is really going on here? I think it is now pretty
clear that he did not mean any of that. All of those
books and speeches and all of that posturing were just
a form of self-advertisement. It was just a kind of political
exhibitionism. It is like the bad language: it was
being turned on and off for effect—because in the end,
what is he interested in? He gave the game away on the
front page of the Daily Telegraph this morning. He
said:
Anyone in a public life, sometimes you’ve got to go in hard
for position—
not to go in hard for people and in support of them, not
to go in hard for principle and in support of that, but to
go in hard for position—to grab that and feed the ravenous
ego which has been driving the member for Werriwa
ever since the early 1980s, when he first got onto
the Liverpool council.
The ultimate question here is one of character. The
new Leader of the Opposition has been judged harshly
by the people who know him best—those who have
worked and lived with him over the years. From the
member for Brand we have this:
Many in the Labor Party await with bated breath for Mark
Latham to do more damage to the Liberal Party than he does
to the Labor Party and taxi drivers ...
New South Wales Premier, Bob Carr, writes about how
the new Leader of the Opposition hung up on him in
tears. We even have the member for Hotham, who said
a couple of years back:
I wanted talent and teamwork—
on the front bench—
The teamwork question was not in doubt with anyone else. It
was with Mark.
The member for Griffith describes the member for
Werriwa’s ideas as ‘just plain loopy’. Tony Sheldon,
the respected union official, talks about the member for
Werriwa’s ideas as being ‘maverick and deformed’.
Workers Online have said:
Some months ago Latham pronounced that the time had
come to muscle up to the Liberals. Ever since he’s been giving
the impression of a cane toad on steroids—ugly, venomous
and prone to explode.
There is no better judge of the member for Werriwa
than Garry Gray, the man who so well understood the
former Prime Minister—the member for Werriwa being
the leader of the Keating government in exile. Gary
Gray knew so much about human character that he
understood that Paul Keating was ‘Captain Wacky’.
Gary Gray said:
It is truly said when you are standing beside him—
that is the member for Werriwa—
and hear ticking it is not his wristwatch.
The fact is that the Leader of the Opposition is no alternative
Prime Minister, because in the end it is character
that counts. There is the scorned former political
mentor, there is the abandoned first wife and there is
the bashed taxi driver—this trail of human wreckage
that the Leader of the Opposition has left behind him—
all who testify to the fact that there is a brutal streak to
the member for Werriwa. I hope he can overcome this,
but he is already 42 and leopards do not change their
spots. Until he can demonstrate qualities of consistency,
commitment and character, he is not a credible
alternative Prime Minister.
