Senator Eric Abetz

Speech to the Australian Monarchist League National Conference, Sydney

Thank you very much and it's a great honour to be with you this morning.

By instinct I am a republican. If I was to set up from scratch the governance arrangements of a brand new country, I would not have a monarchy.

But of course, Australia was never set up from scratch. We were established by the United Kingdom under the Crown.

Oh, how a once proud Labor Party has become a pathetic shadow of its former self. Today we are witnessing again the Australian Labor Party coming into this chamber to do the Greens' bidding.

Yesterday the first and most urgent item on the Government's agenda was to remove a Coalition Senator from the chairmanship of a committee and to replace that very good Senator with a Greens Senator who has only been here for five minutes.

I move:

That the words "Legal and Constitutional Affairs" be removed and replaced with "Environment and Communications" so that paragraph (a) now reads:

(a) that the chair of the Environment and Communications References Committee shall be elected by that committee from members nominated by minor parties or independent senators.

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

So spoke the Labor Party through its current leader to the Australian people just days before the last election. At a time when the polls were perilously close—they were tight—Labor, its leader and its deputy leader solemnly promised the Australian people that there would be no carbon tax. Suggestions that there would be were dismissed by Labor as hysterical.

It's great to be amongst friends. We are here today to pay respect to one of our past elders.  That itself bears voluminous testimony to our theme “Leadership and Conservative Values: An Enduring Legacy”.

May we as a Nation and through this initiative of the NSW Young Liberals ensure that Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner's OBE DSO MC legacy endures…

…That his legacy and the legacy of those that served with him are on parade in the modern Australia of the 21^st century…