Craig Thomson (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What we have been hearing in this matter of public importance debate is from an opposition that is full of wreckers and blockers with no positive program at all for this country. You know you are having a bad day when the member for Canning describes your policies as ‘lunatic’. From what the member for North Sydney was saying, and his analogies with sirens, I can hear sirens as well, but they are the sirens of the ambulance service coming to pick them up for the funny farm because we have so many lunatic economic ideas coming from the other side that they certainly need that sort of medication to make sure that they get back on track. The opposition members are what KFC is to fine food: they are cheap and populist but, once you have had quite a bit of it, it makes you feel rather ill. That is what the general public is starting to find with the opposition in relation to its economic policy.

Let us have a look at some of the things that have been proposed in recent times. We start with the election—let us go back there—when we had an $11 billion hole in the promises of the opposition. It came out and misled the Australian people about their promises. It said they had been audited, looked at carefully, made sure that they had been audited to a ‘t’ so that we could rely on them. We found out afterwards that they were not audited and when we did look at the numbers there was an $11 billion hole. We have a Leader of the Opposition who is not interested in economics at all. The former Treasurer Peter Costello made that clear. We did not need Peter Costello to tell us, because the performance of the Leader of the Opposition time after time on any economic matter has proved absolutely that he has no interest in economics and no understanding of it.

But you have to feel a little bit sorry for the Leader of the Opposition, because look at his two lieutenants who are advising him on economics: the member for North Sydney, Joe Hockey, and the shadow minister for finance. Have we ever had a weaker pair in the history of this parliament in putting forward solid economic policy from an opposition? The shadow finance minister is proposing that we should be intervening directly in the floating of the dollar, that we should be there regulating that. I do not think that we have had a finance minister or a shadow finance minister raise that sort of crazy talk for 30 or 40 years, certainly not since the dollar was floated. It flies in the face of modern orthodoxy in terms of economics.

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