Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Right at the heart of this government is an emptiness, a gulf, a void, a vacuum, between the rhetoric and the reality and between empathy and action. For all of last year, the Prime Minister wandered around Australia, around petrol stations, supermarkets and hospitals, expressing his great concern for rising prices and for hospital waiting lists. When he was not doing that, he was being followed by the member for Kingsford Smith, now his Minister for the Environment and Heritage, with a couple of solar panels strapped to his back, ready to set them up in any park to give a lecture on climate change. What have we seen since election day? We have seen a million people driven out of public hospital insurance onto public hospital waiting lists. We have seen the solar photovoltaic industry destroyed in one stroke. The props that Peter Garrett took around the country have been abandoned. Their use has passed. Now the government can show its real character. We have seen again and again its total impotence in dealing with rising prices and the economic challenges of our times.

Today we had one excuse after another from the government. Why has business confidence collapsed? Why is consumer confidence at record lows? The Treasurer and the Prime Minister stood up and said: ‘It is because of international factors. It is the international shock of rising oil prices.’ Let us look at an international shock. Let us look at 9-11. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York when the two mightiest buildings in the centre of the world’s financial markets were destroyed, when we in the West appeared to be facing an existential threat from terrorism, the Westpac consumer sentiment index fell from 107.6 to 99.5. But by the next month it had rebounded and by January it was 110. That was an international shock; that was a blow and an existential threat to our existence which challenged financial markets and communities. We felt we were no longer safe, and again and again politicians and commentators said, ‘The world changed forever.’

The confidence of Australians changed forever too in November last year. Since the Rudd government came to office, that selfsame consumer sentiment index has dropped by 23.3 per cent. It is now at its lowest level since December 1992. The Rudd government has done more damage to Australian consumer confidence than the 9-11 attacks in New York in 2001. Why is that so? It is because of a lack of leadership. Confidence has to be based on consistency and competence. Yet what we see from the new government is a void, a vacuum. Where is the substance? Where is the consistency? Where is the predictability? We have a Treasurer who for six months in the lead-up to the budget said he was going to make sweeping cuts to expenditure. He was going to reduce aggregate demand dramatically and drive down inflation. He said he was going to deliver a budget that would deliver pain. He said it would be good for us, but that it was going to be a budget that would hurt. Instead, he delivered a budget which increased spending and increased taxes. He wimped out. He could not do it. He could not take the heat. The reality could not match his rhetoric because he did not have the courage of his own convictions. So it was that Goldman Sachs said, which the Treasurer cited as an endorsement and it was faint praise indeed, ‘The best thing that can be said about this budget is that it does not make inflation any worse.’ That was one of the kindest things said about it.

But it was not the only example of this yawning gap between rhetoric and reality, between the empathy that the government portrayed when it was in opposition and the action today. Last year petrol price rises were John Howard’s fault. They were all John Howard’s fault, according to the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd. This year it is international factors. Last year there was not a petrol station forecourt which he did not drape himself over, weeping tears of compassion for the embattled motorists. He would fix it all. He was not just going to deal with macroeconomic policy. He was not just going to deal with inflation. He was going to stop petrol going up—and not just petrol but groceries as well. He went around and around the country citing long lists of prices. But we do not hear about them today. No, we do not, because what we have had today is nothing—the gap, the nothingness, the emptiness, the lack of principle, the lack of substance, the lack of policy.

We have had Fuelwatch—an extraordinary contradiction of principle. We have a Prime Minister who said that he would put the advice of Treasury front and centre in his work in government. The mandarins of Canberra, a class from which he comes himself—he is a public servant—would give the advice to the government and it would be heeded, and yet what do we know? That every single department with any expertise in this matter, including his own, told the government: ‘Don’t do it. It will put prices up. It will reduce competition. It will make things worse.’ And the best they can wheel out is Graeme Samuel, who himself does not say it will reduce prices. No, Graeme Samuel says it is all about the website. It is so people can find out where the cheapest petrol is. Of course, you have to fix the prices; otherwise, by the time people get to the petrol station they might have moved. This is a weak, insipid justification for an extraordinary intervention in the free market. This comes from a Prime Minister who claimed to be developing policy based on evidence, and yet what we found was a policy that was based on nothing more than a desperate desire to be seen to do something.

How oversold, how betrayed do Australian motorists feel? They know that this man positioned himself as the person who could reduce petrol prices, and instead he does nothing. Like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, he likes to watch. This is the Prime Minister that likes to watch. Indeed, it is all about being there, and Peter Sellers is an inspiration for the Prime Minister. One wonders what the role of Dr Strangelove in the nuclear proliferation initiative might have been. But I think the real model is Chauncey Gardiner, just sitting there, watching and talking, talking about problems. When these great challenges of living standards and prices and battles with ever-rising prices and pressures are brought to bear, what does the Prime Minister do? He talks about the problem. He is a watcher of problems. He is not a doer and he has betrayed the Australian people by his inaction. This inert nothingness at the centre of his government is the reason why we have seen all of these indices of consumer confidence and business confidence collapse.

But it is not all bad for the government. Things could be worse. The latest Sensis business index, which surveys small and medium enterprises, shows that there is one government in Australia in which small and medium enterprises have less confidence than the Rudd government. It is, of course, Morris Iemma’s government in New South Wales. So things could be worse. He could have slipped down below Morris Iemma. Having said that, Morris Iemma has been at it for a long time and is ably assisted by his many colleagues, including Mr Della Bosca.

But we have to go back and look at the cynicism of the Prime Minister. He went to speak at Melbourne’s Cranbourne Secondary College on 11 July last year and he talked about the CPI for a while. He said:

A cursory look at the CPI, however, indicates that much of this data is captured by the statisticians but that it often gets diluted when we focus on the aggregate CPI figure of a typical basket of goods and services.

He said:

It is clear that our families don’t go out each week and purchase a car, computer, or a plasma TV—for which prices have generally been falling—but they do buy their milk, bread, cereals, vegetables, fruit, and drinks every week—for which prices generally have been rising faster than the general CPI.

So he delivered the very clear message that he was going to be able to do something about this. He would act, just as he would act with petrol. Yet what have we seen? In March 2008 the CPI release showed that the price of milk had risen by 2.4 per cent in the quarter, cheese 3.4 per cent, bread four per cent, poultry nearly five per cent, electricity six per cent, child care four per cent, automotive fuel 5.4 per cent, and preschool and primary education nearly six per cent. All of these prices are rising and rising, and yet all we have in the Lodge is Chauncey Gardiner, watching away, being there. He has got there. He has got into that position and all he can do is watch.

This country desperately needs leadership. Confidence has collapsed not because of international shocks. We have had them in the past. Could there be a worse international shock than 9-11? If you think about it, the single most horrific shock we have had to our system since the Second World War was this existential threat from terrorism, because suddenly we feared that there could be buildings coming down in Sydney or Melbourne and bombs, dirty bombs. Terrorism was at our doorstep, and then we Australians felt it ourselves in Bali. It is an existential threat to Western society—and yet that threat itself did not impact upon consumer confidence, upon the confidence of Australians in their economic circumstances, as much as has the advent of the Rudd government. That is because, in 2001, John Howard was Prime Minister. In those days we had a government of substance, where the Treasurer spoke about what was going to be in the budget and he delivered. It was a government where there was consistency, clarity and coherence.

Instead, what we have now is a confusing void and these extraordinary thought bubbles. What are we to say about a Prime Minister who stands up in front of an enormous audience in the Great Hall of this parliament and says that he wants to have an Asia-Pacific union and then compares it to the European Union? He does say that it will not be an identikit to the European Union but he gives the clear impression, in everything he says, that we should be heading in that direction—to some form of political union: open borders, common currency and shared political institutions. It is an extraordinary leap. It was derided and laughed at the following day by his Labor predecessors, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. It was genuinely unhinged.

Then we learnt that the man he had sent off to lead the negotiations to bring this great vision—this thought bubble of his—into reality had only been told about this the previous day. So what does that say to us about the substance, the principle and the competence of the government? These confidence ratings—this plummeting business and consumer confidence—are a vote of no confidence in this government. It reminds us that confidence is a fragile thing, and once it has been thrown away it is very hard to regain. (Time expired)

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