Page 5883 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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MR BARR: You have brought this issue forward, Mr Smyth. You profess to be seeking a bipartisan position and then you put forward something that is impossible for the government to support because it contains so many factual errors and politically loaded statements. If you would like a motion to be carried by this Assembly that says that the federal government should not disproportionately target Canberra and public service jobs in seeking to return to surplus, that is something I think everyone in this chamber could sign up to. But I do not think that is really the purpose of this exercise this evening, and clearly from Ms Hunter’s amendment it is not the purpose of the Greens in debating these issues.
I am sure the Chief Minister will have the opportunity to contribute to the debate as well and will no doubt be back for the series of divisions that will occur when we vote on the various amendments. In the meantime, I do have a commitment with the Royal Life Saving Society next door that I will go and complete.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (6.21): From Mr Barr’s contribution, we see the absolute moral bankruptcy of the Labor Party on this issue across the board. Federally, Labor have lied to the people of Canberra time and time again. Their Labor mates in here are now going to endorse that behaviour.
Let us go back a step. Let us look at the gall of the Labor Party. This is a party that looks the Australian people in the eye, looks the people of Canberra in the eye, and lies to them. That is what they are now best at: the “whatever it takes” of Graham Richardson is now embodied across the board in the Labor Party.
Let us look at what they did. They came into federal government in 2007, inheriting the best of times in terms of the budgetary position that they were left. The Liberal Party had paid off all of their debt and left them with tens of billions of dollars in the bank. They turned around swiftly and threw that money away. They wasted money hand over fist and put the budget back into massive deficit—the largest deficits ever seen in this country. Then, when the Liberal Party said, “We will make savings,” they said, “Aha, the Liberal Party is going to cut jobs but we are not.” That is what they said: “Aha, the Liberal Party is going to come and fix our mess. We are not going to fix it; we are not going to cut jobs.” They looked the people of Canberra in the eye and they lied to them.
Katy Gallagher and Andrew Barr are now complicit in that lie because they refuse to condemn it. I remember the ads at the last federal election. I remember the ads here in Canberra. We heard it over and over again. We had the likes of Senator Lundy, Andrew Leigh, Gai Brodtmann and all the federal Labor reps saying, “Those nasty Liberals are out to get Canberra, but not us; we will protect your jobs.”
They are liars, Mr Speaker. They should be called that and condemned for it. And when they go to the next election and say, “The Liberals—don’t believe a word they say, because it might be 3,000 jobs now but it will be 5,000 or 8,000 jobs,” there will be thousands and thousands of Canberra jobs lost. They will be lost because of the mismanagement of federal Labor and they will be lost despite the promises and the lies told by Labor. Let us remember this when we are hearing the propaganda from Labor and the Greens next time.
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