Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

This is the day that the Rudd government’s unbridled arrogance hit the wall. Its entire economic strategy collapsed in a giant, stinking heap. The $42 billion spending spree legislation perished on its rock of arrogance. The government has finally woken up to the fact that the Rudd emissions trading scheme will have a devastating impact on investment and job creation in this country, and it is to go back for economic analysis. Unemployment went up. Business confidence continues to plummet. Retirees’ savings are lost or frozen. Employers are closing their businesses. Labor government is back in Canberra and, in all the style of Whitlam and the state Labor premiers, the debt is racking up and our nation is suffering the effects of the incompetence of this government.

The Labor government, with all of its arrogance, came into this parliament last week and demanded that $42 billion worth of spending—the biggest spending spree in our nation’s history—should be passed in about 40 hours. In tonight’s debate it criticised the fact that the opposition rejected its package in one day. We only had one day to consider the package, debate it in detail and then vote on it. Are you suggesting we should not have made up our mind what we were going to do before the debate was finished? If you wanted us to take more time over it, why did you not give us a proper debate? Why did the government not allow a proper consideration of the issues that were involved? But, when it came to the Senate, the Senate said no. When the government did not have the majority to belligerently force this package through the Senate in the same arrogant way in which it treated the elected representatives in this parliament, the Senate said no, they wanted some time to look at the package. And every day they looked at the package the more it unravelled, the more it became clear that this was an ugly package that delivered not just cheques in the mail but also big bills that would have to be paid  forever.

Not willing to accept the judgement of the elected Senate, the government is belligerently bringing these appropriation bills back into this parliament again—‘Do it again; do it again until you deliver what the government wants.’ The Senate was completely within its rights to question this legislation, and it did so, as one would expect of it. And this package of bills failed in the Senate because it lacks the merit and the quality to deserve the support of senators, as it fails to deserve the support of the people of Australia.

This package is supposed to be about stimulating the Australian economy, not just about spending our savings. It is supposed to be about building a stronger nation. Indeed, I am amused, I despair, that the government could give a package of legislation like this the title ‘Nation Building and Jobs Plan’. It neither builds the nation nor creates jobs. Pink batts in every house may make us feel a little cooler, even if we have to import the batts from overseas, but it certainly is not a comprehensive plan to rebuild the nation. You do not get a boom by putting in boom gates! And more batts just give you a battier package! This package does not give you a comprehensive vision for our country or the imagination to build a stronger economy in the years ahead.

Nor does this package create jobs. The government do not even claim that it will create jobs. All they credit this package with doing is ‘sustaining’ 90,000 jobs—up to 90,000 jobs may be sustained by this package. Even if that is true, that works out at $450,000 per job sustained. Does that sound like good economics to you? Does that sound like a carefully crafted package, designed with a vision for our country that is about jobs, jobs, jobs? This package is not about jobs, jobs, jobs; it is about one job—the Prime Minister’s! He is only after the daily headline.

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