Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Employment) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say that I could not believe it when I saw this MPI. I thought: accusing the Rudd government of not having an agenda is like accusing the Liberal Party of being united. Accusing this Rudd Labor government of not having a reform agenda is like accusing the National Party of believing in climate change. It is like accusing Kyle Sandilands of having tact. If there is one thing that this government have been criticised for over the last 18 months it is that we are doing so much and reforming so much. There are arguments from the media and elsewhere that we are trying to tackle too much at once.

I was surprised that the opposition consider that the matter of public importance that the Australian parliament should debate today is the history of the last 25 years. I would have thought that a recitation of history would be best placed somewhere else. What it shows is that the opposition have given up the policy debate and they just want to look backwards. Well, if you want to look backwards, if you want to have a look at the last 25 years, then let us have a look at Paul Kelly’s book. At page 266, he says:

The origins of the economic model that defined Australia’s long expansion from 1991 to 2008 belong with Hawke and Keating. John Howard did not create the model; he adapted the model. Its creation lay with Hawke and Keating in the post-1983 reform era and this creation is one of Labor’s epic monuments.

What Kelly is talking about there are things like universal superannuation, floating the dollar, deregulating the financial sector, competition policy and reducing tariffs.

To be fair, the Howard government did have its own reform agenda—though we did not agree with most of it. Kelly’s major criticism in his book is a criticism of the Howard government’s failure to tackle reform in its last term. At page 268 he says:

Howard’s most serious economic failure [was] his refusal to maximise the boom year revenues in the cause of long-run reform and productivity gains.

At page 4 he says:

Howard had failed to value sufficiently investment in education and in human capital; he had been too slow in responding to global warming and too reluctant to better coordinate infrastructure investment.

There are three things there: education, climate change and infrastructure investment. It was the failure of the Howard government to invest in skills and infrastructure that caused 10 interest rate rises in a row because of capacity constraints in the economy. And it was the failure of the Howard government to do anything about climate change and its overzealousness when it came to reform in workplace relations that were the reasons that it was ultimately thrown out. It is these three areas—education, climate change and infrastructure—which form the cornerstone of the reforming agenda of this government.

Let us take them in that order. First, climate change. This is one of the biggest reforms that any government will embark upon in the next decade. It is certainly the biggest issue that the 42nd Parliament of Australia has to grapple with. It has been developed over the last 18 months. And the opposition still do not have a position on it, not because they do not have a view but because they have 55 different views. I feel sorry, in a sense, for the Leader of the Opposition.

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