Senator Eric Abetz

“A Coalition Government will introduce new indexation arrangements for Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Scheme (DFRDB) members, benefiting Tasmania’s veterans and ex-service,” Senator Eric Abetz said today.

Senator Abetz said that these changes recognise the unique nature of military service. Better indexation arrangements are a necessary part of a fair, equitable and fiscally responsible military superannuation system.

Federal Labor has reached a new low. Having promised so much and delivered so little, its backflip to run an unconscionable taxpayer-funded misinformation campaign is another example in the long list of broken Labor promises. To add insult to injury and like with so much else they do, Labor has not only embarked on a $38 million taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign but also rushed it and not consulted. Remember throughout all this that Mr Rudd gave this solemn commitment: government advertising was a cancer on the body politic of Australia that needed surgical removal.

So rushed was its desire for a taxpayer-funded campaign, Labor—through its Special Minister of State—crashed through and ignored its very own pathetically weak guidelines by invoking emergency powers. That is bad enough in itself. But—oh, what a tangled web we weave—having disingenuously claimed urgency and emergency, Labor then withheld this decision wilfully and deliberately from the parliament in an attempt to avoid the scrutiny of Senate estimates process.

With less than two weeks to go in Labor’s ‘countdown to chaos’, with the implementation on July 1 of Julia Gillard’s new industrial laws, workers and employees are still none the wiser about how to interpret Labor’s new workplace rules.

Just like Labor’s litany of broken promises, the BER building rorts, their failed border protection policy, the disastrous and tragic home insulation debacle, back flips, belly flops and back downs on the ETS, Fuel Watch and Grocery Choice, Ms Gillard and Labor have once again failed to deliver what was promised.

I move:

The Labor Party’s continued unprincipled attacks on the Senate are regrettable. The Senate is a vital part of Australia’s parliamentary democratic framework, which is in fact the envy of the world. Some would say the Senate should be thankful for small mercies because we have not been spoken about in the same way as the Chinese officials in Copenhagen. But when a Prime Minister speaks to demean the Senate in the way this Labor Prime Minister has and this Labor government has, the Australian people need to simply ask a one-word question: why? The answer is that the Prime Minister and his government are desperately thrashing around, drowning in a self-made quagmire of incompetence and duplicity. So as the Prime Minister and his government’s collective head is sinking beneath the surface, they thrash around desperately thinking that unprincipled attacks on the institutions of this parliament, namely the Senate, will somehow provide them with an electoral lifebuoy by distracting the Australian people from their self-made fiascos. I have a message for Labor: attacking the Senate will not be a lifebuoy, but working with us could in fact have been a lifebuoy. Let us have a look at what the Prime Minister has been saying. Just this week he has said about the Senate:

So we have a very simple message for the Senate, which is get out of the road, guys, just get on with it.