Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let’s get it straight, because I am talking about my experience. I well remember the Hawke-Keating government and the Howard government and, of course, I know the Rudd government. If there is any ground for humour in this place, it is in talking about the latter.

Let me just make some points. I said this at the time of that election: in living memory, the only time a good government got sacked by the Australian people—that is, prior to the last election—it was on the basis of a jingle. Talk about deficits! I can see myself involved with colleagues arguing as to whether we as a nation could afford a billion-dollar deficit. That is what Parliament House cost. The reality is that that is how tight-fisted we were about borrowing money on behalf of future generations. What did the Hawke government get when they came to government? They got a government debt of $16 billion, and they managed to get it up to $96 billion in the life of that government. Of course, when the Howard government was elected, there were problems associated with balancing the forthcoming budget, which was planned by Labor, and they found themselves extremely unpopular. During the election campaign the Howard government never admitted to borrowing another $10 billion. That was the situation.

There have been substantial changes to tax from time to time, but they have typically been announced prior to an election. John Howard made that extremely clear before we introduced the GST. We watched the then Labor opposition come into the House with ‘Joe Hockey pyjamas’, asking, ‘How much will the price of these go up?’ I think they came in with a lettuce at question time one day. The other day, when a question of a similar nature was put to the Treasurer, he called it a scare campaign. Everybody who voted for the Howard government at the 1998 election knew we were going to introduce a GST. But just think about the rhetoric at the last election. When did Labor say, ‘We’ll introduce a resource rent tax retrospectively on the mining industry’?

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