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Good afternoon and welcome to the 44th Parliament. Obviously, the 44th Parliament is now getting
down to business. We elected a new Speaker this morning. The Governor-General's speech
comes this afternoon and from tomorrow the legislative agenda of the new Government will
be dealt with by the Parliament.
There are five very significant bills that will be going into the Parliament tomorrow
and subsequently this week. The first and most important is the carbon tax repeal legislation.
This is an absolutely vital piece of legislation. It is at the heart of the Government's mandate.
The people got to vote on the carbon tax at the election and in the days to come this
Parliament will get to vote on the carbon tax and I trust that ‘Electricity’ Bill
Shorten will have a light bulb moment and will appreciate that the people's verdict
must be respected if the pressure on families is to reduce and if the pressure on jobs is
to reduce.
Then, of course, there's legislation to deal with Labor's debt legacy and the last thing
that the Labor Party should be threatening is the kind of stand-off in the parliament
that we've seen in other countries over this kind of issue. The Labor Party often attacks
the Coalition for being obstructive. Every time the former government brought this kind
of legislation into the Parliament for the good of our country, we were prepared to pass
the legislation and I would commend our example in the last Parliament to the Opposition in
this Parliament.
Then of course there's the mining tax repeal legislation and obviously the mining tax repeal
legislation also involves repealing the spending associated with the mining tax. The mining
tax overall was a multi-billion dollar hit on the Budget because it wasn't raising anything
like the money which the Government said it would. And then there's important legislation
to improve the governance of unions and to restore the rule of law in the commercial
construction industry.
This is a Government which has made a strong start. Obviously, it's only a start but we
have made a strong start and I am confident that we will make a strong start in the Parliament
from tomorrow.