Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hear the other side interjecting, but these are members of parliament, recently elected, who are in safe Labor seats and live in metropolitan Australia and obviously take a very citycentric view of the needs of rural and regional Australia.

We heard the Prime Minister, prior to his being elected Prime Minister, say: ‘I’m going to be a Prime Minister for all Australians.’ I am sure the member for Flynn, possibly in his maiden speech when he makes it in this House, will get up and say, ‘I’ve been to see the Prime Minister and I have urged him to go and see Anna Bligh, the Premier of Queensland, before 15 March and say, “Call off this local government election because it is going to hurt me in my own constituency of Flynn.”’ I urge him to do so and I will be right behind him, as will be the majority of those councillors in Queensland who have said they would like to have an opportunity to decide and have input into the size, shape and sustainability of their local council. They are not opposed to some form of amalgamation or sharing of services between councils. They are very happy to do that, but they want to have a say in how it occurs, the size that they could manage and the shape that it should be, rather than this madness that we have in Queensland. All I say to the Prime Minister is: ‘Listen to the people of Queensland. Use your influence and authority as the Prime Minister to stop this madness in Queensland before it is too late.’ What we have seen is this Labor government demonstrating that it is uncaring, ignorant and arrogant when it comes to the situation of local government elections and the forced amalgamation in Queensland.

I want to talk a bit about the issue of economic management. We have heard a lot from the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance and Deregulation that they believe there has to be pain in the community and pain for working families because there is this inflation bubble that is coming at us all. I say to the Treasurer, to the finance minister and to the Prime Minister, that I well remember the pain that the Labor Party last inflicted on working families in Australia when Paul Keating, the Labor Treasurer at the time, said, ‘This is the recession we had to have.’ That is the sort of pain that the Labor Party knows—‘this is the recession we had to have.’ What working family will ever forget the interest rates that were inflicted by a previous Labor government? Let us look at the comparison between the numbers that the Labor Party inherited from the good economic management of the coalition when we were on the Treasury benches and what we inherited when we came to government in 1996. Let us look at the current inflation rate as opposed to the inflation rate in 1996. Inflation in 1996 was 3.7 per cent; today it is 2.96 per cent. That is what they inherited: a better inflation number than when we came to government.

Let us look at the current unemployment rate—another economic measure of importance for us all. When we came to government in March 1996, unemployment was 8.2 per cent; today it is 4.1 per cent. I will never forget the spectacle as, prior to the 1996 election, I was going to high school speech days and looking at all those young Australians leaving school for the first time with the hope of a job or of going on to further education. Youth unemployment when we came to government was 30 per cent. In other words, in 1996 the prospect for 30 per cent of young people was to join a dole queue. Today we do not have enough young people to fill the job opportunities that are out there. That is what we inherited when we came to government in 1996 as opposed to what the Labor Party—Kevin Rudd, the Treasurer and the finance minister—have inherited from the good economic management under a coalition government.

The Treasurer and the Prime Minister are now trying to blame the US subprime market as part of the problem. I have news for the government: we went through the SARS crisis, and we managed the economy—we continued to grow it. We went through the 9-11 period, when thousands of people worldwide in tourism, the finance market and the aviation industry lost their jobs. We continued to manage the economy well. We went through the Asian meltdown, and we continued to manage the economy well and deliver budget surplus after budget surplus. When we came to government in 1996 we had a $96 billion deficit that we had to deal with. The Labor Party, the new Prime Minister and the new Treasurer—what did they inherit? No debt and $60 billion in savings that is putting downward pressure on interest rates.

So when they come into this place or do media conferences and say, ‘We’ve got to have pain,’ I ask the Treasurer and I ask the Prime Minister: do you want to inflict pain on working families like you did when Paul Keating said that this country must have a recession, and we saw a million people out of work? Is this the sort of pain we are going to see because they have an inability and a lack of experience to manage this complex economy? Don’t they want the challenge? Are they shifting the blame to the coalition for our economic management? Is that what they are doing? Are they shifting the blame because they do not know how to handle it? I rather liked the cartoon the other day of the Treasurer standing there with half-a-dozen levers in front of him and not knowing which one to pull. I think that is what we are seeing—this blame game where it is always someone else’s problem. They were elected on 24 November; they have the power to make sure that the economy continues to grow, that interest rates are kept low and, importantly, that unemployment is kept low. But will they take it up? Will they deliver? It is a great challenge. It looks like the blame game is going to continue. It is always going to be our problem. Notwithstanding the state of the economy that we delivered to the Labor Party, they do not appear to want to have that responsibility because they do not know how to handle it.

Another economic measure of the real strength of the economy and our economic management is real wages growth whilst we were in government as compared with the period when the Labor Party were in government, from 1983 to 1996. Real wages growth for working families in that 13 years of ‘hard Labor’ in this country was minus 0.2 per cent. Yet under our term in government real wages growth over the 11-year period from 1996 to 2007 was 16.4 per cent. That meant families were better off, working people were better off and people were sharing the wealth of the country and getting more reward for their hard work and their effort. Compare that with 13 years of ‘hard Labor’; there was no real wages growth in that 13 years. That is another measure of the competence of the coalition government as compared to the incompetence of the Labor government when it comes to economic management.

Let us also see how we shared the benefits with people on fixed pensions. We provided a 25 per cent of male total average weekly earnings measure on top of the CPI—whichever was the greater—so those on pensions, veterans and war widows had the benefit of sharing in some of the wealth and prosperity of our nation. We had not only the CPI increases twice a year but also the other measure of 25 per cent of male total average weekly earnings—whichever was the greater. They would benefit from that measure as well. I will continue to take the fight up to the Labor Party on their style of economic management. It is about time they realised that they are the government and that they have to stop the blame game. If they got out of their little ivory towers—(Time expired)

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