Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

You should talk—I have been in interviews with you! Tony Boyd wrote on 13 March a very interesting profile piece on Brian Hartzer, who is now the new CEO of Westpac. He is a very impressive person; I have met with him. He was talking about the things that he is worried about in corporations, and he said:

I think one of the dangers in large companies is that people start to think that their job is to create PowerPoints … to make decisions and improve things for customers.

Anyway, apropos of nothing, Joe Hockey gave a PowerPoint presentation yesterday to their party room. While the rest of corporate Australia realises that that their life is not about PowerPoints, the Treasurer thinks his time is to work out how to make the smiley face on the slide. He thinks that that is the way the Australian economy will be saved. So he and the 'Cormannator,' the Minister for Finance, have put together this slide pack that they took to the party room yesterday. The Treasurer had heaps of time to do it, because he does not sit in ERC anymore—he sits in courts! He thinks that the way forward for the economy is for him to defend himself against Fairfax rather than actually putting in the hard yards in ERC.

Talking about rubbish, did you sleep through the media coverage and not see, every single day, the Treasurer out in a court? Sure, he is absolutely entitled to defend himself, but he is supposed to actually put a budget together. The last budget was crackerjack. Did they actually get it through? They did not even get it through. The Assistant Treasurer did today what he did last week: he goes through a number of stats and he talks about how things are getting better. He reckons that job ads are going up, yet unemployment is now higher than during the GFC. He talks about how economic growth is stronger under the government. Let's look at that. Here is the graph: GDP growth annually—March quarter, under three per cent; June quarter, under 2.7 per cent. It is going down. On the PowerPoint slide you would do a slide downwards. That would be a downward arrow. Not up; it is going down. Growth is going down.

Maybe if the Assistant Treasurer holds that graph in a mirror and sees it going another way, he can say it is going up. Joblessness is going up; economic growth is going down. If the economy is going so well, Assistant Treasurer and Member for Kooyong, why did the Reserve Bank decide to cut interest rates? Why did they cut interest rates? Because when they looked into the future and saw where growth was going, it was going down.

He talks about housing starts and about job ads going up. These people could not hit the side of a barn, and they are claiming credit for all these stats. They cannot even get the stats right. They cannot even get their budget through, and they are claiming that in some way all these great things that are happening are because of them. That is a laugh. You would expect that they would be able to defend themselves. Here we are saying that there are all these contradictions in the way they have run budget strategy. And what do they do? They just dredge up the old talking points from when they were in opposition.

The country demands that they fix on the problems of the future and all they can do is the old talking points. They keep bringing up the old talking points.

Mr Taylor interjecting—

If you look at where growth was under us, Member for Hume, in the face of some of the worst economic conditions in 75 years, we had joblessness lower than you. People could actually pay the bills; people could actually have a pay packet. What was the answer of those opposite when they were in opposition? We should be spending less; we should do what New Zealand did. That is what their argument was. That is what the argument of the then opposition leader, now Prime Minister, was: do what New Zealand did. They had people stuck in joblessness for ages, stuck without work, seeing an economy performing less. That is what their prescription was.

This is the problem with the coalition in government now. Because all they did was oppose and they had no firm ideas of their own, they dig up the old talking points and they have not got a way for the future. They are busy creating PowerPoints; they are not busy building a budget and building a fair budget at that. That is absolutely why they stand condemned and why we expect that the next budget will just be one of cuts and chaos.

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