Coulton’s Catch-up 28th November
28-November-2011
The 43rd Parliament of Australia has been a very interesting term. I think we have seen it all since the August 2010 election and most shockingly as of last week the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Representatives Harry Jenkins took place to create more breathing room for the Gillard Government. This will give the Government one more vote in the House of Representatives.
The attempts by the Government to continually frame the Coalition as negative and the Leader of the Opposition as someone who says no to everything are deliberately misleading. It is the role of the Opposition to offer an alternative to the Government. Importantly though, the Coalition does not attempt to block legislation in the Parliament to which we don't object and we often seek to amend and fix any flaws.
In fact, of the 235 Bills that have passed in the House of Representatives during the 43rd Parliament the Opposition has called a division only 28 times. This means that the Opposition has only opposed 11 per cent of Bills in the House of Representatives. And it is worth stating that we make no apologies for voting against 11 per cent of Bills because the legislation we have opposed has been bad policy - bad for our economy and bad for the Australian public.
After 111 years of federal Parliament and 800 years of the Westminster Parliamentary system, it seems the Government expects the Opposition party to assist the government with its legislative agenda irrespective of its merits or its cost on every household budget. We make no apologies about doing everything we can to stop the policy disasters that will damage the country and are not in the national interest. It is our role in Opposition to hold the Government to account and to ensure they are doing what is right for Australia.
In this “new political paradigm” which is the hung Parliament, we have seen many backroom deals going on between the Government and the Greens and regional Independents that support them. This is the most frustrating element of this hung parliament – the fact is that the Government cowers to the demands of the self serving interests of the Greens and the Independents.
Australians are paying a high price for four years of the Government’s reckless spending, broken promises, waste, drift, deficit and debt.Instead of showing a clear sense of direction since 2007, the Government has commissioned 185 policy and program reviews, committees and inquiries over the last four years.
Labor inherited a strong and growing economy, a $20 billion budget surplus and $45 billion in the bank. Yet, in four years Labor has turned a massive budget surplus into four consecutive record budget deficits, with more budget deficits to come as long as it remains in charge of the nation’s finances. Under this Government Australia has gone from having $45 billion in the bank to net government debt of $107 billion. The Government is accumulating debt at the rate of $100 million a day.