Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a truism in politics that we get our own arguments but we do not get to have our own facts. Any discussion of the state of the Australian economy has to rest on basic facts. Let us start with a couple. Only rarely in the post-war era have unemployment, inflation and the cash rate all been below five per cent. We are in one of those moments right now. Fact No. 2: not once in the Howard or Fraser governments, about 20 years in office, was there one single year where government spending was cut in real terms. Yet as Stephen Koukoulis has pointed out, Labor governments have cut real spending in five years since the mid-1980s.

Cutting real spending is not easy. It requires making some pretty tough decisions, but we have done it when the times have demanded it. We have also increased government spending when the times have demanded that. That is what Keynes taught us in the teeth of the Great Depression: when there is a big drop in private demand, governments should step in to fill the gap. But those opposite think that governments should never go into debt. They have an anti-debt strategy.

We have heard already in this debate about those opposite having a different attitude when it comes to their private affairs than they do in their public affairs. Privately those opposite are buying mining shares, while publicly they are talking about the collapse of the mining industry. Privately those opposite take on debt. They do so for a perfectly good reason. They take on mortgages early in their lives and pay them off later in their lives. As Richard Dennis pointed out in a column in today's Australian Financial Review, debt is not a villain and Australia's debt is among the lowest in the developed world.

Those opposite are playing a dangerous game with confidence. Business confidence is not created by government. Business confidence is the responsibility of all. It is the responsibility of business leaders—and I have to say that some business leaders could have exercised a little more responsibility over recent months in maintaining the business confidence that benefits them as well. Business confidence is also the responsibility of those opposite. All of us have a responsibility to speak in terms of facts when it comes to the Australian economy.

We are putting in place a carbon tax because we know that is the right way of taxing non-renewable resources that can only be taken out of the ground once. These resources are not owned by any individual, but are mined thanks to the agreement of the Australian people. We are putting in place a price on carbon pollution that will see Australia's emissions cut by five per cent by 2020. That cut could have been put in place two years earlier, had those opposite stuck with their then leader or had the Greens voted with those Liberal senators who defied their new leader and voted for the CPRS legislation. Yesterday in this House the member for Melbourne took issue with some facts that I had placed on the record, that by voting against the CPRS package the Greens were responsible for an extra 10 million tonnes of carbon pollution, the equivalent of annual emissions of two million cars. The member for Melbourne said that somehow my comments 'exercised gall' and such actions would not have resulted in a better outcome for the planet. But that is not the case. We have very clear modelling that had the Greens or the Liberals supported carbon pricing legislation two years earlier we would have gotten fewer emissions.

We have a price on carbon pollution now and it is a price we had to put on. We are acting early. Those opposite would have us put our heads in the sand on every economic reform. They would have us put our heads in the sand on the minerals resource rent tax, carbon pricing and good economic investments.

Debate interrupted.

See this speech in context