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

The great challenges that Australia faces are being avoided and abandoned by this hollow and empty government, this incompetent government. Only today we have seen the Prime Minister claiming that a sign of his government being tough on the great challenge of terrorism—and you would think all sides of this House would be united in the common cause of taking on terrorism—is the Attorney-General giving a press conference and commenting on a trial the day before the jury has concluded its deliberations and in so doing provoking the defence counsel to apply for the jury to be discharged, resulting in getting a caning from the trial judge and completely needlessly providing grounds of appeal to the convicted persons. This sort of incompetence is cited by the Prime Minister as an example of being tough on terrorism.

Is it tough on terrorism to give appeal points to people convicted of terrorism? I do not think so. A government committed to taking on that challenge ensures that the security services and the police apprehend persons suspected of terrorism, bring them to trial and see them convicted and dealt with in accordance with the sentences handed out. What it does not do is provide appeal points for the accused persons having been convicted. Needlessly done so, out of pure incompetence, the Attorney-General put a headline ahead of taking on the challenge of terrorism and he has been defended today by the Prime Minister, who claims his government is tough on terrorism.

They are not competent enough to be tough on anything. They are not consistent enough to provide leadership on the economy. The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance and Deregulation wander around the countryside spouting one incoherent and inconsistent line on the economy after another. Only today we had another great example of this from none other than the finance minister. I had said that the present global financial crisis was the most severe that most of us had seen in our lifetime. He denounced that; the finance minister said that that was wrong and it was exaggerated. He said I was taking things out of context and being reckless. Well, let us see where that observation came from. The International Monetary Fund in April this year in its World Economic Outlook wrote:

The financial market crisis that erupted in August 2007 has developed into the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.

The finance minister does look a bit careworn, but I think he was born after the Great Depression. Certainly, I think the IMF’s comments support what I have said, but perhaps the finance minister does not agree with the IMF. What a pity that he has not been speaking to the Prime Minister. What a pity he does not pay enough attention to the speeches of the Prime Minister. On 24 May this year the Prime Minister in a speech entitled ‘Building a modern Australia for the 21st century’ said:

The global economy is going through what the International Monetary Fund has described as the greatest financial shock since the Great Depression.

He has repeated that quote again and again. He did it again in June in Queensland.

What sort of government is this? What kind of economic leadership can this government provide if on the one hand we have the Prime Minister reflecting the views of the International Monetary Fund on the gravity of the global economic crisis—this crisis in credit and financial markets which we are witnessing and which has been worsening—but they are then promptly abandoned by the Minister for Finance? What is the government’s position? What is the scale of the challenge? Is it or is it not a serious issue? Is the IMF right or wrong? Is the Prime Minister right or wrong? How would we know? We get one incoherent, inconsistent line after another.

Of course, we have seen a transformation in the Prime Minister’s language about inflation, and indeed in the Treasurer’s. It is like Jekyll and Hyde, but I am not sure who is Jekyll and who is Hyde. However, there has been a complete transition. At the beginning of the year inflation in Australia was considerably lower than it is today. According to the Treasurer and the Prime Minister it was out of control—the genie was out of the bottle. The Treasurer, alone among the treasurers of the world, unlike any other person in his role in any other country in the world, chose to egg on his central bank to put up interest rates. He chose to talk down the economy and talk up inflation. He stood there the day before the Reserve Bank board met and said that inflation was out of control. He sent a message to the top of Martin Place: ‘Put up those rates.’ And interest rates did go up.

I was criticised then for saying that the Reserve Bank should stay its hand. I feared that the global crisis would worsen and that money, which was already getting scarcer and dearer, would become even scarcer and dearer in the months ahead. And it has. That was the Treasurer’s line and he was consistently echoed by the Prime Minister for the first seven months or so of this year. Now we have the new, mild Prime Minister. He is no longer talking about inflation monsters wreaking havoc across the nation. He says that Australia should be proud that our inflation is lower than that of the United States. Really? It is a lot higher than it was in January, and it was lower than the rate in the United States in January, too.

He says that we have to keep the economy in context. Where was the context in January? Where was context when they were running down the achievements of the Howard government while pursuing a cheap, shallow and hollow political agenda designed to score a few incredible political points? They were incredible because there is no-one in Australia—Labor or Liberal—who would not rather be living in John Howard’s economy than in Kevin Rudd’s. To that end, they talked up inflation and talked down the economy. But now they pretend that none of that happened. They want to put everything in context and speak reasonably.

I was taking some notes while the Prime Minister was speaking during question time today and I thought he was actually reading from the book written by the former Treasurer, the member for Higgins. He was boasting about the size of our surplus and going on about the surpluses that Australia had accumulated over many years; many years of good economic management had given Australia a source of stability and financial strength. So they have. But that stability was established by the coalition’s economic management. That economic management was opposed at every turn by the Labor Party when it was in opposition. That is the economic management that was run down day after day after day for the first part of this year.

They now see the consequences of their actions and what they have wrought. We have a strong economy, we have a national government with no net debt and we have a better regulated banking system than any other comparable developed country. The coalition has put in place over many years measures that make our economy relatively stronger than others. It is not immune, but no economy is. However, our economy is relatively stronger and relatively more resilient. That was not shouted from the rooftops earlier this year. For most of this year we have had our economy run down.

Is it any surprise that we have paid a price? Consumer and business confidence around the world has declined. How could it not? But it has declined more in Australia than it has in most comparable countries. How can it be that consumer and business confidence has fallen more in Australia than it has in countries that are now in the depths of recession? How can that be? What is the differential? It is the government: if you change the government, you change the country. Australia has elected a government that does not have faith in the people of Australia; it has elected a government that instead of projecting confidence and leadership chooses to run down its own economy, talk up inflation and egg the central bank to put up interest rates. That is what happened in November last year and we are now living with the consequences.

Our strong nation has lower levels of confidence than nations with economies far weaker than our own. As a result, we pay a price. When you lose confidence, you lose credit. When businesses lack confidence, they do not borrow, lenders do not lend and people are reluctant to hire and to invest. We are paying a heavy price today because of the government’s shallow political agenda for the first part of this year. This government had no economic strategy, simply a political one.

In every respect of its policy this government has demonstrated an inability to come to terms with the real issues. Only yesterday, greeted with a new Leader of the Opposition, the Prime Minister, on the day after the fourth-largest investment bank in the world goes into bankruptcy, after a massive fall on Wall Street and after greater concerns than ever arising about global financial markets—we have just seen AIG being bailed out by the US government; these are events of enormous consequence—after all of that turmoil, seeks to work with me and collaborate with me on what issue? The economy? The Murray-Darling Basin? The environment? No. The republic. Really! There is no focus on the issues of today, no priorities and no commitment to the real issues of our time.

We have seen again today the contempt that this government has for pensioners. This is a government that sends its ministers out to say that they could not live on the age pension. And they could not live on it. That is how bad they see the situation. We say: ‘Right. We know you’ve got your big review. That’s fine. But let’s do something now. There has been a massive rise in prices over the last 12 months since the last coalition budget—a very substantial increase in prices across the board. Let’s act now. Let’s give $30 a week to single age pensioners. Let’s do that. We can do it right now. It doesn’t prejudice a review. It doesn’t prejudice doing other things. Let’s take some action right here, right now.’ But what do we have? Just pathetic debating points from the Prime Minister.

When we were in government, we acted to protect pensioners. We changed the indexation of the pension to the higher of either the CPI or 25 per cent of male total average weekly earnings. If we had not changed that indexation from the previous Labor system, single pensioners today would be $72.80 a fortnight worse off and couples would be $122.60 a fortnight worse off than they are today. So we took action in government to support pensioners. But do you know something, Madam Deputy Speaker? The Prime Minister should get out more, because there have been big changes. We have seen prices going through the roof. He should spend less time wandering the corridors of New York and more time wandering the aisles of shopping centres and supermarkets because he would see there what has happened to prices. He has seen what has happened to living standards. He has a report that tells him what has happened there, and he has the opportunity to act now, but he chooses to do nothing. Chauncey Gardner yet again. He likes to watch, but the watching has to stop. Watching is not helping the pensioners. It is not protecting the Australian economy. It is abandoning our nation to the lack of leadership from the hollow men that are this government.

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