Address to the Liberal Party, Victorian Division State Council, Melbourne 28-05

E&OE……………………….…………………………………………………………………
 
Well, Dan, thank you so much. I’m pleased you called me the alternative Prime Minister because Bill Shorten and Greg Combet think they’re the next Prime Minister and we’ll let them fight it out with Julia Gillard.

Ladies and gentlemen it is terrific to be here. It’s great to be amongst so many friends and in particular, so many of my federal parliamentary colleagues and I want to mention just two who’ve come all the way from Western Australia – obviously, my Deputy, Julie Bishop but Steve Irons, stand up please Steve and take a bow.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a tremendous honour to stand before you as the standard bearer for our national party. In so doing, I acknowledge the Premier Ted Baillieu, a worthy successor to Sir Henry Bolte and Jeff Kennett who’s victory galvanised Liberals right around Australia and who’s six per cent swing showed how Australians everywhere were sick of governments of spin and deals and was the first public sign that Australians were growing out of love with minority government and increasingly viewing minority government in Canberra as an experiment that had failed.

I also acknowledge, ladies and gentlemen, your incoming president Tony Snell with whom I am determined to work closely. I, in particular, want to salute your outgoing president, my friend, my mentor, my former colleague David Kemp, whose organisational reforms should be a model for our party right around Australia.

But I acknowledge everyone in this vast concourse today. You are my political family. But in every family there are some people who have a special place of honour and when I last described myself as the political lovechild of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop, Bronwyn entered into the spirit of things by saying that it must have been an immaculate conception. Julia Gillard, I’m afraid, had no such sense of humour. She said that it was really Donald Trump and Sarah Palin who had come together. No wonder she lost her quorum shortly there after. It was in fact, ladies and gentlemen, a cheap jibe from someone who has not grown into national leadership. This is a Prime Minister who is floundering because she does not understand that business is a vital part of our social fabric and she does not understand the ways in which political theory, even the best political theory, must be tempered by robust common sense.

Now ladies and gentlemen, in fact, as we will acknowledge all of us later on today, every single Liberal is the heir of Sir Robert Menzies whose greatest speeches will be republished at this conference in an hour or so time. Every single Liberal, every single one of us is standing up for today’s forgotten people. The working families of 2007 who have become the forgotten families of 2011.

Ladies and gentlemen, the latest statistics tell the tale of a country which is going backwards. The latest statistics show that it now costs $50 a week more to live in Melbourne than it does to live in Adelaide and it costs $50 a week more to live in Sydney than it does in Melbourne and what is the Government’s response to this attack on every Australians cost of living? It is to put a great big new tax on everything.

Ladies and gentlemen, before coming here today, I went to visit the Salvation Army in Bourke Street to help to dispatch their volunteer collectors. Do you know that 80,000 new people came to the Salvation Army for help for the first time ever last year? This in an economy that the Treasurer and the Prime Minister keep boasting is the best in the world. Well, let me assure all the forgotten families of Australia that we in this party will never lose our concern for the most vulnerable amongst us.

My friends, in many respects, I am a typical Liberal. But at university, I worshipped the water that B.A. Santamaria walked on and at St Patrick’s seminary, I [inaudible] to grasp the great truth that the only life worth living is one of service and as I look around this vast concourse I don’t see businesspeople engaged in dog eat dog capitalism. I see employers who are putting their own houses on the line so that they can put food on the tables of other families. I see people who volunteer hours and hours and hours of their week to help build better communities. I see amongst my fellow Liberals people who are ambitious, not for ourselves but for our country and in his forgotten people’s speech, Bob Menzies posed this great question – whose side are you on? And we as Liberals are on the side of every Australian who is prepared to have a go rather than those who think the world owes them a living. We regret the fact in Menzies words that we have too often been getting ourselves on the list of beneficiaries while removing ourselves from the list of contributors. As Liberals, we have faith in the common sense of the Australian people, who don’t need officials to tell them how to live. We understand as Liberals that our first duty is to our own people, to our own country, to our own civilisation and to others whom we respect and this ladies and gentlemen is why our party has such potential appeal to all the decent working people of Australia who respect family values, who are intensely patriotic and who understand in the marrow of their bones that there is no such thing as a free gift from government.

Now ladies and gentlemen, it’s often said that this is the worst government since Gough Whitlam. But that is very unfair to Gough Whitlam, whose government was certainly incompetent but who never sold Labor’s soul to the Greens. Ladies and gentlemen, this government has wasted money. It has bungled programmes and it has broken promises. There’s the $2.5 billion spent installing combustible roof batts and then taking them out again. There is the $16 billion spent building school halls where the Government’s school halls cost twice the price on average as the independent school halls. Then ladies and gentlemen, there’s the $50 billion that’s now being spent digging up people’s front yards to connect fibre to their homes so that the Melbourne Age for instance can be downloaded in one third of a second, rather than three seconds. That of course is if we want to download The Age, other than on those days when Peter Costello appears as a columnist.

And then of course ladies and gentlemen, the traffic jams, the rail congestion and the port congestion just gets worse and the very worst feature of this government is that it just never learns from its past mistakes. It is now spending hundreds of millions sending untrained people into pensioners homes to install set top boxes. Often they are the same people who were previously installing the dodgy pink batts and it’s costing twice the price of the private sector doing the same thing. They’re like the legendary Irishman who lost ten pounds betting on the Grand National and then lost 20 pounds betting on the action replay.

This government has a horribly long list of failures which demonstrate that if it has anything at all, it has the Midas touch in reverse. There’s the 260 childcare centres of which only 40 were built. There was the 2,500 promised trade training centres, of which fewer than 200 are operational. There were the 35 GP super clinics that were supposed to bring in new doctors and new nurses and which were supposed to provide care of up to 24 hours. Well, I can tell you and I can tell Nicola Roxon, I have more doctors in my office in Canberra than she has in most of her super clinics.

There was the East Timor detention centre that’s now turned into the people swap with Malaysia and let me make this observation my friends, the only boats that this government has managed to stop are not the people smugglers boats. They’re actually the boats carrying on merchandise trade, which the MUA stopped over the last week and let me say to the Prime Minister, I can guarantee that no boat people sent to Nauru will ever be caned but she cannot guarantee that boat people sent to Malaysia will not have that terrible fate. This is a Prime Minister who is too proud to pick up the phone to the President of Nauru because that’s what John Howard did and now we learn that she’s too proud even to pick up the phone to the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea because Kevin Rudd did it first. Then of course, ladies and gentlemen, there was the hospital takeover which has degenerated into business as usual only with more bureaucrats rather than more doctors and nurses. There’s the private health insurance rebate that wasn’t going to be means tested before the 2007 election but which is now. There’s the family tax benefits that weren’t going to be scaled back before the last election but are now. There’s the mining tax that was settled before the last election but which is plainly not settled now and then of course ladies and gentlemen, there’s the climate change citizens assembly that before the election was supposed to establish a deep and lasting consensus. Remember that phrase? A deep and lasting consensus that was supposed to be established before there could be any change back to the emissions trading scheme that Kevin Rudd had wanted but which Julia Gillard had sabotaged. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I can inform you that the climate change citizens’ assembly is actually meeting in Canberra this weekend. It comprises of two independents, one Green and one member of the Labor Party to take the other guys instructions back to the Prime Minister.

And finally, in this compendium of failure and deceit, there is the carbon tax. Let us never forget that six days before the last election, our Prime Minister solemnly declared, “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”. Having made that solemn pledge, now with equal apparent sincerity, she tries to tell us that the one policy that is needed to help every single industry is a great big new tax on everything. Well ladies and gentlemen, let us never forget our history. Let us never forget the lessons that have come to us from the politics of the great state of Victoria. Sir Robert Menzies first led our party to national victory campaign against bank nationalisation. Bank nationalisation would have destroyed people’s asset values. Bank nationalisation would have zapped the vitality of a sector of our economy that is vital to every other sector and bank nationalisation would have massively expanded the size of government

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake, the carbon tax is the bank nationalisation of our time. Just for starters, a carbon tax at $26 a tonne would raise your power bills by 25 per cent. It would add six and a half cents a litre to your petrol prices and will raise your grocery prices by five per cent and that’s just for starters at $26 a tonne. But we know that that would be were it starts but that will never be were it finishes because the Greens say that the carbon tax will have to be $40 a tonne to drive the change from coal to gas and will then have to go to $100 a tonne to drive the change from fossil fuels to renewables and we know that it’s the Greens who are calling the shots in this Government.

The whole point, ladies and gentlemen, of a carbon tax is to stop the use of coal and to make electrical power more expensive and let’s be under no illusions as to what this means. Over time, phasing out coal means economic death for the La Trobe Valley in Victoria. It means economic death for the Hunter and the Illawara in New South Wales and it means economic death for the Bowen basin in Queensland. Over time, pushing up the price of power means death to the steel industry, the aluminium industry and the motor industry because ladies and gentlemen, you cannot run a steel mill on solar panels. You cannot run a motor plant on wind power.

Ladies and gentlemen, a go it alone carbon tax in Australia does not mean that we will use less steel, less aluminium, less cement, less glass and less plastic. What it means is that all of these will be imported from countries that have not engaged in the same act of economic self harm. That’s what it means. Over time, a go it alone carbon tax means the slow strangulation of manufacturing in Australia. Let the message go out to our country from here in Melbourne, the manufacturing heart of our country that we must be a country that continues to make things. We must be a country with a first world economy but we cannot be a first world economy if our manufacturing industry has been killed by Labor’s carbon tax.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is not being negative to point out these fundamental facts of life. That there can be no first world economy without a manufacturing industry and there can be no manufacturing industry if our manufacturers are subject to costs and penalties that are not present to their competitors around the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you as the proud representative of the values that our party has represented as much in our time as in Bob Menzies time. It is important that we never forget that as Liberals we believe in freedom and in choice. As conservatives, we support the family and values which have stood the test of time. But above all else, as Australians we support policies that work and that will give the people of our country, the forgotten families of our country, hope opportunity and reward.

Now ladies and gentlemen, since the beginning of this year, I want to remind you of all of the positive new policies that we have put forward. We have put forward a new approach to water management, including the construction of new dams. We have put forward the need for much toughing anti-dumping laws. We have called for a new intervention in to Alice Springs and the other larger towns of the Northern Territory. We have offered a bipartisan approach to welfare reform. We have put for a four point plan for participation reform. We have put forward a new attack on business red tape modelled on a successful programme here in Victoria. We have insisted that taxpayers dollars should only be spent on infrastructure that has been subject to a published cost benefit analysis and ladies and gentlemen in a measure that I am very proud of, we have put forward a $1.9 billion mental health package which finally shamed this bad government into doing something about it in the budget.

These positive initiatives supplement all the other positive initiatives that this party, this Coalition took to the election. Positive initiatives like public schools run by local school councils. Positive initiatives like public hospitals run by local hospital boards and funded to provide services, rather than to say no to patients. Public hospitals that in the rest of Australia run rather like the public hospitals which Jeff Kennett established here in Victoria. Positive initiatives like relocation allowances for young people to move to where the work is and to where their future may best lie. Positive initiatives to give incentives to get young people and older people off welfare and into work. Positive initiatives like a standing green army, 15,000 strong to supplement and advance the Landcare work that is currently being done by councils, farmers and volunteers and positive initiatives like our direct action plan to reduce emission, not just to make everything more expensive, by planting more trees on suitable land, getting more carbon into soil by using more organic fertiliser and using smarter technology to take carbon dioxide from power stations and turn it into bio-diesel and stockfeed and I want to thank, of all of my colleagues, the remarkable work that Greg Hunt has done on this policy.

But ladies and gentlemen, the most positive thing we can do for Australia right now is to save our country from this toxic tax. That is the most positive thing that we can do. That’s the course to which I dedicate my political life and to which I dedicate the work of this great party.

Australians deserve a sense of hope and of opportunity and of reward. The hope they had under the Howard Government which has now in such significant measure been lost. But there can’t be a sense of hope, opportunity and reward while the threat of a carbon tax hangs over the coal industry, our largest export industry and hangs over the manufacturing sector of our country, in particular a carbon tax that the Prime Minister said would never happen under any government that she led.  

We have to stop this tax. We have to take our country back. Not for us, ladies and gentlemen, but for everyone because there can be no integrity in our public life while a federal government is trying to sneak through the biggest tax change in our history, which it lied about before the election. There can be no integrity in public life while this betrayal is taking place.

Ladies and gentlemen, I can assure you that my colleagues and I will not rest until we have saved Australia from this toxic tax and until we have saved Australia from this bad government that’s getting worse. We can’t do it on our own. We can’t do it on our own. We cannot save this country if the citizens of this country do not want to be saved and that is where I need your help. Now, I know I’ll have it. I know I will have it but I want you to do everything you can to motivate, not just your fellow Liberals, but your fellow citizens. 

This is the best cause in our country right now. This is the best we can do for our country right now and I want everyone in this room to be just as dedicated to this great cause as Julie Bishop and I and the rest of our parliamentary team is.
 
Thank you so much. We’ll see you on the hustings.

[ends]