Mr ABBOTT (Minister for Health and Ageing) (3:52 PM)—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 noone 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 had 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 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 believed 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 high-income earners. But of course he opposed those self-same 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-advertisem*nt. 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 Gary 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. (Time expired)
