Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to follow the member for Ryan, who is doing a hell of a lot of a better job than John Moore did when he was the member Ryan. That is my opinion. As Minister for Defence that bloke used to get up and say, ‘The government’s position is well known.’ He had a relaxed attitude to these matters; the fact was that he thought that it was almost beyond him in terms of what he had to do. Michael is working and trying hard. I understand that but, gee, sometimes he goes over the top. Thank you very much for the manner in which you have conducted this debate on what is in itself a relatively narrow bill, the Employment and Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Welfare to Work and Vocational Rehabilitation Services) Bill 2006. You have so widened the debate that I can talk about just about anything!

Certainly, I can talk about my economic experience working in an electorate office: it was for the bloke who ran the joint at the time as Treasurer and then as Prime Minister. I can also reflect on the current Prime Minister when he was the Treasurer, when there were in the order of a million people unemployed as a result of the 1982-83 recession. Malcolm Fraser might have been the Prime Minister, but the Treasurer of the day could not bring himself to tell the truth prior to the election as to what the deficit was going to be in that year. He was asked in the week before the election and he said, ‘Oh, in the order of $4 billion.’ The day before the election, he admitted to about $6 billion. He had had direct advice from the Treasury before he said $4 billion, before he said $6 billion, that it was in the order of $9.6 billion. Uncorrected for inflation over that period of time, it is exactly the interest payment you were talking about. In fact, it is a little bit higher.

I will tell you, as I told the current Treasurer—who has no understanding or does not want to have any understanding of the situation—that you are talking about $96 billion worth of Labor debt as if it were from one single year. In the 1982-83 budget year, the member for Bennelong was responsible for lying to the Australian people about what the deficit was going to be prior to the election and doing it in a deliberate fashion in order to try to save the government. That amount of money, in current dollar terms, is in the order of $42 billion, about half of the $96 billion, and that was only one year’s worth of deficit from the member for Bennelong as Treasurer. There is not one single year in the history of the Commonwealth when a conservative government has brought in a surplus budget. You can go right the way up to when Labor came to power in 1983. Following Phil Lynch, the member for Bennelong was the Treasurer for very many years. He was the Treasurer when they did a whole range of things. There was money under beds and all sorts of problems—

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