Government Performance

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (15:39): I am a 21^st century member of parliament. I am familiar with the great wonder that is the internet. I am familiar with its ability to disrupt government ministers' Dorothy Dixers. I am familiar with it—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I beg your pardon? Government questions. There is no such thing as a Dorothy Dixer.

Mr KNOLL: Okay.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: That stopped you, didn't it?

Mr KNOLL: I am familiar with it as a tool that holds an unfathomable amount of knowledge that will help to propel the human race forward with ever-increasing speed. I am also now familiar with it as a permanent record of the details of youthful pranks that my generation engages in. We as a society could say that we could not have seen this coming, that this is somehow something that has come up in the future and we are now in an age where we have to deal with these issues, and I do think that, but I also believe that we have had fair warning.

Over the winter break, I dusted off an old thing called a book and read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Written in 1949, he envisaged a future where technology would be omnipresent in our lives and predicted the loss of liberty that would result. He also wrote, though, of a concept called 'doublethink', defined as the ability to hold contradictory views simultaneously and believe them both to be true. And even though the book is fictional, I see a lot of truth in the conduct of the government today.

At the last election the Premier used the slogan, 'Let's keep building South Australia'. This policy manifesto, always seemingly clutched close to the bosom of the Premier, much like a safety blanket, confirms it. Yet since the election, they have abandoned the new courts precinct, delayed for the third time the Gawler line electrification and have actually now reduced the average infrastructure spend from $1.9 billion over the past five years to $1.3 billion over the forward estimates.

The ability to hold both of these truths simultaneously takes some serious intellectual gymnastics. This government said that they have worked to protect jobs, whilst at the same time presiding over an unemployment rate that is the highest in the nation. The government goes around talking of its jobs plan which, since the rivers of GST gold have dried up, has been exposed as nothing more than window-dressing to hide the fact that we are now in the middle of a crisis for which the government has no plan and no answer.

There is indeed a real art form in being able to say that we are protecting jobs by losing jobs. I think it is fantastic to be able to stand up in this place and say with a straight face, 'We are protecting jobs by losing jobs.' The Premier also says that we have the most reformist training sector in the nation, creating a competitive quality training environment that will help to train our people for the jobs of the 21^st century, whilst at the same time his government is quarantining 90 per cent of the places for the government provider, TAFE, effectively killing an entire private industry. The concept of increasing competition by reducing competition is pure doublethink.

The government on the one hand has spent millions in advertising attacking the federal government whilst at the same time claiming that they are working constructively together. Which truth should we believe? They obviously believe both. There is a bliss in the concept of doublethink, an intellectual ecstasy that comes from being free from normal deductive reasoning and simply accepting that you can say and believe one thing, in fact do the opposite, but still hold both things to be true.

The South Australian people, though, cannot experience this same bliss. In fact they should be scared that every time this Labor government reaches its cold, slimy, grubby hands into the pockets of South Australians to fish around for every last cent of tax that it can squeeze, it will not be spending this money wisely. In fact it could end up being used to taxi the tourism minister up and down the street, spending that the Premier believes to be entirely appropriate, or it could be wasted on a redundancy program that did nothing to reform the public sector or be wasted preparing for half-baked ideas that get canned, with millions of dollars wasted in the process.

It may seem a joke to some that this government has been able to enter an alternative universe free from causation, correlation and consequence, but back here, seeing the experience of cold, hard reality, there are no jokes, just the realisation that the Labor experiment has failed and, as a state, we will continue to pay for these mistakes, over and over again.