Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Health) Share this | Hansard source

And a member, let the record state, as well as an adviser—so double responsibility. History will record the economic legacy of that government as one of wasted opportunity—wasted opportunity to build the capacity of the nation for the long-term future; a wasted opportunity through mismanagement of the benefits and returns from the mining boom over the many, many years that we had to endure Peter Costello as Treasurer.

Time is short, but let me touch on a few areas where the cost to the nation of this waste and mismanagement was at its highest. There are plenty of areas that I could go into, but I want to talk a bit about infrastructure, a bit about health care and a bit about national savings. First, let us recap the sort of opportunity that the last government, under the treasurership of Peter Costello, enjoyed. They were blessed by economic circumstances. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! As much as the then member for Higgins, Peter Costello, and his acolytes like the member for Casey will try to tell us, it was all a party trick by Peter Costello, they were blessed by being in the right place at the right time. They had terms of trade the likes of which we had not seen for 40 or 50 years. There was uninterrupted world growth, with booms in China and booms in India.

The Business Council of Australia told us how good it was in the lead-up to the election in 2007. They said that the last five years in the lead-up to the 2007 election had seen $87 billion of upward revisions in the Howard and Costello budgets. We saw in the last four budgets of the previous government delivered by Peter Costello average spending increases of 5.7 per cent. You would think that that would have been reflective of a focus on building the prosperity of the nation into the future, but it was not. It was reflective of wasted opportunity, of mismanagement of the benefits of the mining boom. What did we get? We got lots of one-off payments—great press conference opportunities for the then Treasurer and the then Prime Minister but not much capacity for ordinary Australians, fixed-term pensioners, to plan their financial future in the long term. We saw lots of wasteful spending, like the decision to fund private health insurance for millionaires through the PHI rebate. That would be excusable if there was nothing else to do but at the same time the Business Council was telling us that infrastructure bottlenecks in Australia were costing us $8 billion to $10 billion per annum in lost economic growth. The Reserve Bank was telling us 20 to 25 times that there were capacity constraints in the economy that were just ignored in skills and ignored in infrastructure by the last government. By the time they lost government we were still only 20th of 25 OECD nations in terms of our infrastructure spend, in spite of having the best economic growth in the OECD for years and years.

Their approach to infrastructure instead was exemplified by examples like those mentioned by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government in question time today—the regional rorts program, and the grant of $22,000 to a cheese factory that had closed before the expenditure was allocated. Fortunately we have a different approach. This budget confirms that we doubled in real terms the transport infrastructure spend for the six years after we were elected compared to the six years before we were elected. Notwithstanding the manifestly different financial circumstances that we confront, with a revenue hit of about $110 billion through the GFC, we are acting where the last government did not act on broadband infrastructure, with the NBN Co.

Other wasted opportunities of the mining boom include things like the complete failure to build national savings in this country. They inherited the blessing of a nine per cent superannuation guarantee charge, which has built more than $1 trillion of national savings from the decisions taken by the Hawke and Keating governments. The great cost to the nation from the mismanagement and wasted opportunity by the last government’s failure to further build national savings is only now being addressed by this government. What did the former government do in the area of super? One of their first decisions was to kill off the idea that ordinary working Australians might have their superannuation increased from nine per cent to 15 per cent. What else did they do? They did not do anything in relation to the adequacy of pensions for older Australians—absolutely nothing in 12 years of uninterrupted economic growth and the sorts of budget upward revisions that I talked about.

What have we done in vastly different fiscal circumstances? We announced, only in the last couple of weeks, that we will move the superannuation guarantee charge from nine per cent to 12 per cent. That means amazing things for an average 30-year-old, for example—about $108,000 extra in their retirement income compared to what the Howard and Costello government considered adequate. We have also seen the biggest increase in the age pension in over 100 years of its existence. A single pensioner now receives more than $100 per fortnight more than they received under the last government—not in one-off payments but structural increases to the age pension. Now single age pensioners receive two-thirds of a couple’s pension, whereas the last government did nothing.

Another example, which is dear to my heart because of the job that I am blessed to have as Parliamentary Secretary for Health, is the cost to the nation of the last government’s complete failure of and complete mismanagement of health policy. Of course, none other than the Leader of the Opposition was minister for health for four or five very long years. That failure, that wasted opportunity, that mismanagement of policy was so much more shameful because they knew the scale of the challenge. Peter Costello had commissioned the intergenerational review, which set out the scale of the challenge presented by our ageing population. They knew about the increase in the burden of chronic disease, but what did they do? They did nothing. They indulged in the blame game against state governments, admittedly with some reciprocation from time to time.

Tony Abbott withdrew more than $1 billion from the hospital system in the 2003-04 budget. He capped GP training places at 600, thinking, ‘If you just restrict the number of GPs, maybe people will stop getting sick, or, if the poor dears continue to get sick, they will just stay at home and not try and impose themselves on the Medicare system.’ Just imagine, with the $87 billion of upward revisions in the budget, what the last government could have done with the extra dollars. Instead, we have had to start to fix the wasted opportunities, the mismanagement of the last government, with vastly more challenging fiscal circumstances. The budget delivered this week has shown that we have been able to deliver more than $7 billion in additional investments to the health system after a landmark agreement with all the states and territories, except Western Australia, for a vastly different set of governance arrangements and different financial architecture in the health system. This will deliver more doctors and nurses; it will deliver more beds, particularly more subacute beds; and it will deliver shorter waiting times for elective surgery and EDs.

The economic record of the Liberal Party over the last 15 years has shown a complete lack of focus and discipline. Australians count their blessings that that party was not on this side of the House during the global financial crisis. Imagine the cost to the nation. At least Peter Costello understood and liked economics, and his legacy is bad enough. Who knows what would have happened if the Leader of the Opposition had been in charge at the time of the GFC. We know he does not like economics. We know he lacks focus. We have heard reports that he spends more of his time in acting classes. We know he likes spending time on his ‘Sporty Spice’ routine, in the ocean and on the bicycle. We know that, if it were a choice between doing the hard work to get the country through a challenging economic time or getting on the bike or having a bit of a swim, we know what the Leader of the Opposition—(Time expired)

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