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

Ah, yes, you did. I see the Treasurer interjecting there. The Treasurer is to economics what the Prime Minister is to public speaking. They are hopelessly incompetent, disgracing both professions. The reality is that last year they made a difficult situation worse. Australian businesses were pressured by higher interest rates that they did not deserve, that they did not need and that were matched in no other country. Why? Because the government had, and always has had, a political agenda. This is a government driven by politics and driven by ideology. It does not care about the economic results of its policies; it is only interested in the spin. So politics trumped economics in 2008. Politics trumped economics when the government went for an unlimited bank deposit guarantee.

The government talk about their motor vehicle finance special vehicle, which has not yet advanced any money at all, for a motor vehicle industry that is floundering because their incompetent management of the bank deposit guarantee resulted in finance companies being starved of cash. They ignored the advice of the Reserve Bank. The Reserve Bank said, ‘It needs a cap, and the lower the better.’ They ignored it, until finally they brought it down to a million dollars, the highest in the world. It used to be even higher, of course.

Then we have had the cash splashes, which we were told were going to give an adrenalin shot to the Australian economy, and all we get is reports of higher sales of plasmas. This is what—some retail commitment of the Prime Minister? We keep losing jobs. We are losing jobs every month. Economic growth is going backwards, and all we get from the government is more debt. They are indeed addicted to debt and, like most addicts, they do not understand the gravity of the addiction they are under, because the government can argue that this or that policy they have today may provide some economic benefit—they can try and make a case there; all the evidence is against them—but the one thing we all know is that higher debt means higher interest rates and higher taxes.

They are throwing Australians out of work with misguided policies. We have heard that from one energy company after another this week—thousands of jobs for no environmental gain. Sheer incompetence! Who could be so incompetent as to design an emissions trading scheme that destroys Australian jobs, that damages the economy and that does nothing for the environment, exporting thousands of jobs overseas? We have evidence from Xstrata, Envirogen and one company after another complaining about the jobs they are going to lose and the billions of dollars of investment that will not go ahead. And what do we get from the Prime Minister? Just rhetoric and ideology. His essay in the Monthly about neoliberalism sums it up. He talks about being in a parallel universe. He is in a universe of his own with Hugo Chavez, waging a two-man campaign against neoliberalism. He is not even in the same universe as his Deputy Prime Minister. The Prime Minister claims that our financial system was undermined by neoliberal policies of the previous government, yet the Deputy Prime Minister here goes to Davos and says our financial and prudential regulatory system is ‘better than world class’. Who put it in place? We put it in place, not you. The people you excoriate put in place a system you say is better than world class.

But what we are losing today is jobs. We have a government that are not prepared to invest in jobs. There have been $23 billion of cash splashes: first, nearly $10 billion in December. We have the evidence of that. We know that 80 per cent of it was saved. We know that it had no impact on economic activity. We know that, far from creating 75,000 jobs, it created not one. We know that it was a flop. It was, as one economist wrote, not so much a bang for the taxpayers’ buck but simply a ‘dull thud’. But then, having failed once, the government backed the truck up with the credit card of our kids and borrowed another $13 billion and did it all over again. Now we see that there is not enough money to fund the infrastructure they claim to be so committed to, because they have spent it. They have spent the money. The big infrastructure fund of which they were so proud has no money in it because they have been spending the money on one poorly conceived venture after another. And they have the gall to stand here and say we propose nothing in reply! We proposed a scheme—a policy; a stimulus package—that would have created jobs, that would have created more economic activity and that would have given real support to small business. We proposed measures that were responsible, that were economically beneficial and that would have created jobs. Instead we have simply had a spendathon from the government.

Now we have the spectre of Ruddbank. Talk about a dog returning to its vomit! The Labor Party goes back to the failures of the past. It goes back to Tricontinental, WA Inc. and the State Bank of South Australia—all of those great examples of Labor banking. It goes all the way back to Brian Burke. Yesterday we saw the Treasurer, sight unseen, endorsing the Vision property project in Brisbane as being suitable for Ruddbank to finance. Let us see what Robert Harley wrote in today’s Financial Review:

If Swan has become the arbiter of what is or is not “viable”, this industry is in worse shape than I thought.

And his first call was a doozy. The Vision proposal—Brisbane’s highest at 79 levels—has been a marginal project for years, even in the good times. No one was surprised when, in November last year, one offshore funder got cold feet and the developer, Austcorp, deferred.

That is what we will see. They have walked in there, like the mugs they are, ready with the taxpayers’ chequebook to sign up to take over one dud loan after another—one poor investment after another. And, as Labor governments have always done, they will say, ‘We’re supporting the economy; we’re supporting jobs.’ That is what Tim Marcus Clarke said. That is what they said in Victoria. That is what Cain and Kerner said. That is what Brian Burke said. They have always got the same mantra. They talk about jobs while they destroy them. They are addicted to debt, and that debt will slow our recovery. It will mean higher taxes and higher interest rates for years—perhaps generations—into the future. (Time expired)

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