Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Hansard source

The honourable member talks about inflation. Labor broke the back of Liberal inflation. You left us with 11 per cent and we reduced it to two per cent. If the honourable member wants to dispute that and stay in fairyland, I am quite happy for him to do so. The honourable member for Lyons understands this because he was around then, but the parliamentary secretary was not around then so he likes to argue from the point of recent history. I am giving you the economic history of Australia when your former Treasurer—the Prime Minister, Mr Howard—relinquished the reins of government. Labor broke the back of Liberal inflation, Labor laid the basis for the low interest rate regime, and Labor gave you four years of four per cent growth. But what did your Prime Minister give Labor? He gave us an economy that was going backwards and losing jobs. He gave us 11 per cent inflation. He gave us interest rates of 11 per cent. Of course you do not mention the 20-odd per cent that they went to while Mr Howard was Treasurer, when the Liberal Party was in power.

We could go into a range of other areas if the honourable member wants to debate modern Australian economic history—I am quite happy to refresh his memory—but the simple fact of the matter is that the Australian economy is on a knife edge. We are saddled with debt. We are labouring under interest rate increases as a result of the debt that Australians are carrying. That is not my analysis; that is the analysis of your Treasurer and your Prime Minister. They said that high levels of debt would feed directly into interest rates. And what did the government do? It promised it would bring them down but it did not.

One thing you can be absolutely certain of is that the government will either not address the skills crisis that Australia faces or it will put a proposal into the ring that it cannot deliver on. Another certainty is that interest rates will rise under the Liberals because, since the last election, there have already been three increases. Some buffoon on the other side, who happens to be a member of the executive, said that those interest rates have been overdramatised. I say to him: come down to my electorate of Corio and see the families that are struggling now because their penalty payments have been removed by your industrial relations system, resulting in a contraction in their incomes. They are now forced to work in places away from Geelong. They have to drive to Melbourne and fork out more for their petrol every day. But not only that, they also have to suffer Liberal interest rate rises. They are not Labor interest rate rises; they are Liberal interest rate rises. When they go to the supermarket they face Liberal increases in inflation.

The reason why we have an inflationary situation in this country is that this government neglected to invest in skills, resulting in pressure on Australian businesses. That is the reality. You can talk about a commodities boom that is sucking skilled workers to the west in Queensland but the simple fact is that 21 months ago the government said it would establish 25 colleges and it has established only four. The government said there would be 300 enrollees in each of those colleges—a total of 7,500—and there is a total of 300. That is your record: high Liberal debt and increasing Liberal inflation. The certainty that Australians now face, courtesy of the coalition, is a rise in interest rates, which burdens households, farmers and workers, yet you have the gall to get up and say that the state of the Australian economy and the prosperity that Australians enjoy is the result of all your work, when in fact you were left with four years of four per cent growth and a low inflation rate.

The Australian people are finally waking up to the fact that this prosperity can be very illusionary when their household incomes are under pressure from high Liberal interest rates, from high Liberal inflation and from petrol prices that are a result of the government’s failed energy policy. When the Australian people look at their kids, who were supposed to go to these colleges and be skilled, they see a skilling process that does not meet the needs of the Australian economy. In a knee-jerk reaction, the government has delivered immigration policies that enable workers to be brought into this country on low rates, and the kids of Australian families have to compete with those people in the marketplace under the government’s industrial relations system. Nobody is under any illusion. I say to the honourable member opposite: don’t try to hide behind the economic facts. I am quite happy to debate them with you.

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