Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

One of my colleagues here describes him as a chameleon. That is very unfair, and I am disappointed. It is very unfair to chameleons—chameleons are only one colour at a time! The Prime Minister seems to adopt every political colour simultaneously. He is a highly evolved form of chameleon, if a chameleon he is at all! But he claims to be a social democrat, and, of course, the question is: ‘What is a social democrat?’ We all know that the difference between social democrats and other democrats is that social democrats are socialists. One of the Prime Minister’s fellow social democrats—one of his brethren in the international assault on neoliberalism—is, of course, Hugo Chavez. He is a very distinguished political leader, and the Prime Minister has obviously modelled himself on him. I just note that, not so long ago, Hugo Chavez was asked by journalists about the differences between him and Fidel Castro. Hugo Chavez said: ‘Fidel is a Communist. I am not. I am a social democrat.’ The time has come for the Prime Minister to rule out being a communist, but it was probably only a matter of time. He will have a go at that at some stage!

We have seen, over the last two months, labour force figures where the number of Australians without jobs has risen by 83,000. The unemployment rate has risen from 4½ per cent to 5.2 per cent—the highest in four years. And, I might say, youth unemployment is at its highest since 2001. We have seen a sharp contraction in GDP of one-half of one per cent during the December quarter. That has left Australia on the brink, at risk of a Rudd recession. We have seen evidence from one company after another, and I have cited just two today, that the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme is going to cost them jobs. They are addicted to this emissions trading scheme as a matter of ideology. The reality is that there is no virtue in an emissions trading scheme per se—it has to be well designed. You can have a well-designed emissions trading scheme which does not cost jobs or you can have a badly designed one, such as the one the Prime Minister is proposing to foist on Australia.

The fact of the matter is that so many jobs in Australia depend on industries which are emissions intensive and whose competitors are in countries which are unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to put a carbon cost on their emissions-intensive industries. If you take the export of thermal coal, for example, the largest exporter of thermal coal nowadays—it was not always so—is Indonesia. If, as a result of the Prime Minister’s emissions trading scheme, we export 100 million tonnes less thermal coal, Indonesia will just export 100 million tonnes more. Thousands of jobs are lost in Australia, and there is absolutely no benefit to the environment. That is why we have always opposed the Rudd government emissions trading scheme. We have always opposed it because it is bad for jobs and bad for the environment, whereas the scheme we proposed several years ago was protective of emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries, recognising that economic reality.

Of course, this lack of competence in economic management is inherent in the Rudd government. We saw at the very outset of their government the way in which they talked up inflation for purely political purposes. They talked up inflation and talked up interest rates. That was the great challenge. We used to get lectures from the Assistant Treasurer all the time about the evils of inflation, and we were described as economic idiots because we dared to suggest that there was a global credit crisis and there might be more than enough tightening and contraction coming from the international credit squeeze. It turned out that we were right on that point—very right, as it turned out—and the Australian businesses that suffered from interest rates being too high for too long should blame the Rudd government for the way in which they talked up inflation.

Then, of course, we saw the extraordinary bungle of the unlimited bank deposit guarantee. How much damage has this done? This, of course, is part of the reason why the government are now rushing to establish Ruddbank. They have dislocated the financial markets without any precedent. There is no comparable country in the world with a strong, well-regulated financial sector—courtesy of the coalition in government, I might add—that has done so. There is no precedent of a country like Australia going for an unlimited bank deposit guarantee. Why would the country with the most secure banking system go for the most unlimited, extensive and comprehensive bank deposit guarantee? For a political headline. It is all politics and no economics. That was the Prime Minister’s objective. And what have we seen? The finance companies that underwrite the motor vehicle industry and equipment sales cannot raise money. Cash management trusts cannot raise money. Mortgage trusts cannot raise money. A quarter of a million Australians’ savings have been frozen. Now we see, as the government rush to try to patch up the damage they have done, that they have come up with this misconceived Ruddbank, probably the most misconceived exercise that the government have put forward to date. I will speak about that in speaking on the bill in a moment.

The government was left the strongest hand of economic cards it could possibly ask for. It was left with a national government with no debt, with cash in the bank and with a Future Fund that was established to take the burden of the previously unfunded liabilities to public sector pensioners off the shoulders of future generations. It was left with strong surpluses. It was literally the envy of the world, described by the Economist magazine as the ‘wonder down under’. That strong economic management had created jobs—2.2 million jobs—and, when we left office, the lowest unemployment rate for a generation. We pursued those policies that create jobs because we are passionate about employment. We recognise that the best form of social welfare is employment, to give everybody the chance of a job and to make it possible for Australians to live their lives as they wish, because we believe passionately that the job of government is to create and foster the economic environment where Australians can do their best. We now have a government led by a social democrat Christian socialist who, in his own words, wants to put the state at the centre of the economy. He wants to put an activist state at the centre of the economy. He really is a worthy companion of Mr Chavez.

Our opponents pretend to have compassion for the unemployed, but at the same time they are legislating for unemployment. They are, in fact, the party of unemployment. In 1996 the coalition inherited an unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent from the Keating Labor government. It took us a decade to lower it, just as it took us a decade to pay off their debt. Increasingly it looks, tragically, as though history will repeat itself under the Rudd Labor government. It is delivering us the classic old Labor trifecta, that terrible trifecta of more unemployment; more debt that will burden generations to come with higher taxes and higher interest rates; and, as we saw last week, more strikes. We cannot afford a government that is so careless about the economy and so ready, in pursuit of its own ideology, to send thousands and thousands of Australians onto the dole queues.

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