Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Deputy Speaker, I am pleased to rise to talk on Labor’s MPI about broken promises. It is a dangerous place to be sitting in this Chamber at the moment while Labor and Liberal are slinging arrows at each other. The reality is you are both as bad as each other when it comes to broken promises and sticking to the commitments you make, whether they are before elections or during the course of parliament.
I will get onto the Liberal Party. I know my colleague, Ms Rosol, wants to talk about Ashley Youth Detention Centre, but we can talk about a whole raft of things in the Liberal space. However, I will start with Labor. Labor’s stadium position is the biggest broken promise of all. Labor took itself to the election last year, to two elections, in fact, in 2024: to the general election and the upper House election. It was not till a couple of days after the Legislative Council election that they announced their position of support for the stadium, before the writs had even been issued for Mr Willie’s old seat.
It is not just any old support for the stadium. It looks like it is a blank cheque. The money does not matter, the issues with the location do not matter and this now-corruption of process does not matter. That is a deep shame.
Similarly, with pokies. We saw what happened in the 2018 election. Yes, you lost that election and reviewed your policy, but you were unable to stick to that commitment.
It extends even to small things. I brought some amendments to the Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill on pets at the last sitting to give more rights for renters to make minor modifications to their property, for disabled people to have better disability access, for better security, for better safety modifications. Even though it is in the platform the Labor Party took to the last election, they found a way to oppose it in that bill. There is also the issue of mandatory minimum sentences and that is a real shame.
However, this is about the government’s broken promises, so I will switch to them. While the stadium is a huge one, I am going to start with the pokies precommitment card because that is a fundamental betrayal of people doing it tough in Tasmania. We know pokies are a scourge on our society, sucking the life out of our most vulnerable communities. We all supported the notion of a precommitment card. If you are not going to take pokies out of our pubs and clubs, at least you can control the loss and damage. The precommitment card was a way of doing that. The Premier has orchestrated a mechanism by which he can abandon that, seemingly without even talking to his relevant minister, at the behest of the pokies lobby.
The University of Tasmania (UTAS) is another example where the government took a position to the election that was going to constrain UTAS on what it could do with its land. The government broke that promise by doing virtually the exact opposite of what it took to the election.
Housing is another broken promise. The government said it would build 10,000 new social and affordable homes. It is written in the 2030 Strong Plan in black and white. However, as we have discovered through the process of questions in this House, it is not at all about new social and affordable housing. It includes vacant land, crisis accommodation and affordable rentals. The Liberals are cooking the books to make it look like they are meeting their commitments.
The stadium is really the cream on top. Not only did the Premier say that Tasmania’s bid would not be contingent on a stadium, and a stadium was not part of the bid. He told us, as political representatives and parties, to sign on to a team subject to a stadium not being part of the bid, and yet there it is. It was part of the negotiations being led by the department all the way through. The Project of State Significance (POSS) assessment is probably one of the greatest deceptions – it is the government’s own process, the government’s own assessment body, the Tasmanian Planning Commission, and it is now manufacturing an excuse and manufacturing a reason to actually attack their integrity. Then we come to the $375 million –
Time expired.
