Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad that the honourable member for Stirling is in the chamber, because he is going to get a guernsey. Today takes the cake. We heard the Prime Minister today in question time running away from the ads of the last election campaign and saying: ‘I didn’t authorise them. I might have appeared in them, but I didn’t authorise them. Have a look at the radio interview; don’t look at the ads; don’t look at the scads of ads that we spent millions of dollars on at the last election. Forget about the lectern that I stood behind during the election campaign when I said that we’ll keep interest rates at record lows; forget about the calculators we sent to every marginal seat so that you could pull out your little calculator to see how much your mortgage would go up if interest rates went up. Forget about all that. I didn’t really promise to keep interest rates at record lows.’ We saw weasel words go to a record high in question time today.

Now we see the Treasurer coming out and again blaming the states. He accused the honourable member for Lilley of selective quoting. He referred to evidence given by the Governor of the Reserve Bank at a House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration hearing on 18 August 2006. He said that the shadow Treasurer was selectively quoting him. The Treasurer then quoted Mr Macfarlane and started the quote with:

I think the states by and large have had very prudent fiscal policy over most of the period you are referring to.

Talk about selective quoting: he started the quote late. The Treasurer was being tricky—mean and tricky. The honourable member for Stirling asked a question at that House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration hearing. The honourable member for Stirling asked:

Are there dangers posed to the economy by the states running their fiscal policy in that way?

That was a fair enough question. I am sure that he spent a lot of time thinking about it. He worked it up and asked the governor, and what was the governor’s response? He said:

I think that is a bit of an unfair characterisation.

We did not hear that from the Treasurer. He started at the next sentence. Talk about selective quoting; talk about gilding the lily; talk about playing with the facts. The Treasurer has been caught bang to rights. The honourable member for Stirling, in his next question, understandably said:

I will move on from that.

No wonder, because he did not get the answer that he wanted. He went on to say:

Given that the latest rate rise was in part in response to factors such as oil prices and bananas ...

The government cannot get its lines straight. It is either the fault of the states or the fault of bananas. You cannot blame them both. Apparently, it is everybody’s fault except the government’s.

We had the Prime Minister saying in question time today, ‘I didn’t authorise those ads; they didn’t really represent my point of view.’ That is not how the Australian people saw it. The Australian people took the Prime Minister at his word. He said that interest rates would stay at record lows, and millions of Australians believed him. But I agree with the Prime Minister on this point: there is something more important than the politics of this issue. There is something even more important than his credibility, which lies in tatters. What is more important is the effect of today’s interest rate increase on millions of ordinary Australians. That is the most important thing out of today’s debate. There is one very good reason why the first economic responsibility of the Commonwealth government—whoever forms it—must be to have downward pressure on interest rates, and that reason is that people are hurting, and hurting badly. Some of us on this side of the House have been talking about this now for almost two years. We have been talking about the stresses in parts of the economy and the pressures on working families. But nobody on the government side listened until Mark Textor told them that they had better listen. Every single indicator tells a story. This government is so out of touch that it has taken Crosby Textor to tell them that they have a problem.

Let us take a snapshot of some of the key indicators. There has been a 13 per cent increase in personal insolvencies across the country—a very substantial increase. In some parts of the country, there has been an increase of much more than that. In Western Sydney, in Greenway, in Lindsay, in Blaxland and in my seat of Prospect there have been massive increases in personal insolvencies. In 2005, $49 million was claimed against mortgage insurance as people defaulted on their home loans. This year, $210 million has been claimed on mortgage insurance. We have seen a massive increase in the amount of superannuation that people are accessing early to get by on a day-to-day basis. That has gone from $31 million in 2001 to $135 million in 2006. Today’s increase is only going to see these types of figures grow.

There are more figures, but behind every figure is a family, a family struggling, a family trying to work more, a family reducing expenditure so much that they have already cut out the luxuries and are now into the essentials. This is going on in Western Sydney and elsewhere throughout the country on a day-to-day basis and this government simply does not get it. And these are the people who the Prime Minister says have never been better off. And these are the people who will pay the human price and be the human sacrifices for today’s interest rate increase.

This is not what people had in mind when they believed the Prime Minister at the last election when he said, ‘I’ll keep interest rates low.’ They did not have in mind a regime in which Australia has the second-highest interest rates in the Western world, a regime in which only New Zealand, out of all the countries in the Western world and the OECD, has a higher interest rate than Australia. Japan, Greece, Sweden, France, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Italy, Germany, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom all have lower interest rates than Australia. Maybe it is their fault that we have higher interest rates. Today it is the states’ fault; last week it was bananas causing high interest rates; maybe it is Luxembourg which is causing high interest rates. I am sure that we will hear the lines and the excuses.

The Australian people do not want false promises. They know that there are no magic solutions. They know that interest rates do not come down overnight. They know that the Reserve Bank sets interest rates. But they expect the government to listen and to put downward pressure on interest rates. They do not expect a blame game. They do not expect the Prime Minister of this country to say, ‘I didn’t promise at the last election to keep interest rates at record lows and, by the way, go and blame the states.’ They expect the Prime Minister to show a bit of empathy and to have an economic framework that puts downward pressure on interest rates. They expect the Prime Minister to run a fiscally conservative stance and not to take every item on the smorgasbord, which the Treasurer condemned him for. They expect the Prime Minister to be running a budget surplus that puts downward pressure on interest rates and not having crazy John’s closing down sale like he did at the last election. They expect a government to invest in the skills crisis—to fix our skills crisis and not to have the Mickey Mouse technical colleges, which are a national disgrace. They expect the government to take infrastructure seriously.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer walk in here and say, ‘Those terrible states; they are spending too much on infrastructure, you know. They are putting upward pressure on interest rates by spending too much on infrastructure,’ when the current and previous Governors of the Reserve Bank have warned them 20 times that the skills crisis and the infrastructure crisis are the things putting pressure on interest rates. I had a look at the Reserve Bank statement today. I thought, ‘Oh well, clearly Morris Iemma, Peter Beattie and John Brumby are going to cop a whack in the Reserve Bank Governor’s monetary policy statement issued today.’ But the word ‘states’ does not get a mention. The word ‘Premier’ does not get a mention. The words ‘deficits run by state governments’ are just not there. What we get is a full page statement from the Governor of the Reserve Bank with no mention of the apparently evil states putting upward pressure on interest rates.

Australia has a chance to make its judgement in a few weeks time. Within two months the Australian people will have a chance to make their judgement and they will be reminded of those ads with the Prime Minister saying that interest rates would be kept at record lows. And they will be reminded of something else this Prime Minister said: he said that the Australian people have never been better off. They will be reminded that you can have a government that puts downward pressure on interest rates by investing in infrastructure, by dealing with the skills crisis—by having a plan—and by having a national plan on infrastructure. (Time expired)

See this speech in context