Senator SINODINOS (New South Wales) (17:17): What a privilege it is in this matter of public importance debate to follow Senator Bilyk, who reminded us of the view of Bob Hawke on the eve of the 1990 election. She is right, he did say that about the then opposition, yet today on the front pages of Australian newspapers it is the government which is the story. That is not the making of Tony Abbott. Perhaps Tony Abbott made it more difficult for the government, but the fact of the matter is that we have a riven government, a dysfunctional government. That is the topic on the front page of all of our papers. That is not the doing of the opposition; that is the doing of people within the Labor Party, this government. The reason this is a dysfunctional government does not simply go back to the character of the Prime Minister or the character of the former Prime Minister; it actually goes back to 1996 when Labor went into opposition. One of their first acts in opposition was to forsake the reform program, the reform ambitions and the reform achievements of the Hawke and Keating governments. They did not want to talk about them. They let them go. They then spent 11½ years in opposition waiting for something to turn up. I can remember Kim Beazley, when he was Leader of the Opposition, saying when the then coalition government introduced the GST: 'We will surf into office on the back of the GST.' In other words, 'We will wait for the GST to be implemented; some people may feel upset but we will capitalise on that misery and we will get back into government.' On it went for 11½ years. The only Leader of the Opposition who had a go at coming up with a new Labor policy—a third way, if you like, and this he did largely before he became opposition leader—was Mark Latham. When he wrote about enterprise workers and the like he showed he was doing some thinking in opposition, but when he became opposition leader the machine men of the Labor Party said: 'No, that's not the way to win. You've got to look at the polls; you've got to look at exploiting the negatives of the government of the day, and if you do that really well you'll become the government.' It did not work. It did not work then; it has never worked. You have to come to government with some conviction, some framework for governing. Even though I had left by then, I remember well the 2007 election campaign. The Labor campaign was essentially based on the longevity of the then government, on the age of the then Prime Minister and on the fact that the Labor opposition would do some things that the government had not wished to do such as signing the Kyoto protocol. That was it, that was the policy platform, and then a few gimmicks like Fuelwatch and GroceryWatch. Do you want to go through the list? They held out the hope that they could do something about the cost of living, but it was a false hope. They were all gimmicks. That was not a framework for government; that was not a vision for changing the country or a vision for reform. Then they were blessed with a Prime Minister who decided he would try to do everything at once because he was the smartest person in the room. No problem had been adequately dealt with unless Kevin Rudd had looked at it. So we had all these reviews. Initially, we wondered what sort of government this was with all these reviews. Then all of a sudden we had a plethora of things that were on the agenda for COAG. We were going to have big health reforms—big this and big that. Then the saviour came along for this government—the global financial crisis. It finally gave them an objective outside of themselves, outside the political framework. Something real was happening that they had to address. What did they do? They spent and they spent up big. The coalition supported some spending in response to the global financial crisis. We had to be prudent, but we did not support the full extent of spending that the government had in mind. We did not support the pink batts and we did not support the Building the Education Revolution, because it became clear after a while that the global financial crisis became an excuse for spending for spending's sake—spending for ideological reasons. I do not have anything against building school halls, but the priority in education in this country today is to improve the quality of the curriculum. Senator Bilyk talked about the work that Labor is doing on the curriculum, but that is simply a continuation of the work initiated by Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop. I can remember Kevin Rudd, and even Kim Carr, at a higher education function talking—boasting almost—about how the global financial crisis was the last nail in the coffin of neoliberal ideology. It was going to be the last nail in the coffin of capitalism. And Rudd boasted that he would put government at the centre of the economy. He went back to his maiden speech, where he talked about government at the centre of the economy. If you want the economy to prosper you put people at the centre of the economy—the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, the workers of Australia—not the dead hand of government. What I am saying is that this is a government which, from the beginning, had no real program for government. It was just reacting to events. And this has gone on and on. And when Kevin Rudd was finally dispatched it was not because of some great clash of principle within the parliamentary Labor Party. He was dispatched because the polls said he had to go. And in many ways that also sealed the fate of his successor, Julia Gillard. She came to power simply off the back of the fact that if you live by the polls you die by the polls. What sort of aspiration to leadership is that? Ms Gillard made statements before that feted election in 2010 such as, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,' and then, for the sake of retaining power, she broke that promise so quickly after the election. Then she dissembled and was forced, after an extended period, to admit: 'Okay, we did make a promise. But circumstances changed: we had to get around the roadblock set up by the other side.' That is not leadership. The Prime Minister made a commitment to the Independent Andrew Wilkie and then, when the going got tough, she welshed on it. No wonder he is ready potentially to support a no confidence motion against this government! He does not trust them. He is not the only one; the Australian people do not trust this government. They have come to that view and they keep expressing it—even in the polls so beloved of certain members of the Labor Party. Going forward, the challenge over the next period for the next, coalition government will be what to do about the mess that it potentially inherits. Tony Abbott the other day at the Press Club gave what he called a landmark speech. It was a framework speech where he brought together many of the policies he has had for the last 18 months as leader. Senator FEENEY: What an orator! The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Ludlam ): Order! Senator SINODINOS: Yes, he had a critique of the government but it was largely a speech about the positives—what he would do as Prime Minister. And he talked about the importance of cutting spending. He did talk about cutting spending. He said: The first object of any government is to do no harm. That is what he said. He also spoke of government doing fewer things better. Government senators interjecting — The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Order! Senator Sinodinos, resume your seat. This debate has mostly been reasonably respectful. I ask that Senator Sinodinos be heard in silence. Senator SINODINOS: Recently, Tony Abbott spoke of government doing fewer things but better. The next, coalition government will forensically examine government spending and reduce that spending in an intelligent and strategic manner. We will ask the questions. What is the problem that this spending is meant to address? Is the public sector best equipped to deal with it and are there better, more cost-effective approaches? We do not just believe, for ideological reasons, that the public sector should do it. I come to the NBN, the National Broadband Network, which was hatched on a coaster on a VIP aircraft by Senator Conroy and the then Prime Minister Mr Rudd because that is the only way they could get face time to talk about the matter. How can you determine that a $30 billion, $40 billion or $50 billion major national infrastructure project can be agreed in those terms? Some people say, 'Look, it's blue sky. You've got to spend the money because there will be big benefits.' But we are talking about $40 billion or $50 billion worth of public revenue. Tony Abbott is committed to an approach on infrastructure where there will be a rolling 15-year program, with projects being prioritised using published cost-benefit analysis. Transparency in this project assessment will improve confidence in government decision-making and promote better outcomes. And this approach will ensure that major programs are not treated in a cavalier fashion and are not, like Labor's NBN, approved without adequate scrutiny from a public interest perspective. These are major issues. The Australian people regard the government as they regard their own housekeeping, and when they see the government splurging, spending too much or not thinking about what it is spending on, they think, 'What are the consequences at the household level of doing that?' And they then think, 'We don't want those consequences at the national level. We want a government that will live within its means—a government that will not be ideological but will be pragmatic about the best way to deal with a social problem; a government, ultimately, which keeps all of its election commitments.' On that last note may I say that under the Howard government we had a charter of budget honesty. In the future, if there are Labor governments, we will need a charter of election commitment honesty, because the experience of the last few years is that Labor cannot be trusted to keep its word.