Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today in this grievance debate to address the vital issue of the credibility and competence of the opposition on matters of economic policy and financial responsibility. I do so not only on behalf of my constituents but also on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of families and small businesses across Australia who rely on strong economic management and financial responsibility here in Parliament House, in Canberra, by their government, to deliver vital services, jobs, low taxes and continued low interest rates.

When Labor was last in office it could not manage money, and it was the battling families and small businesses who paid the price for that failure. They paid with a million people unemployed. They paid with interest rates of 17 per cent for families and 21 per cent for small businesses. They paid with reduced opportunities. They paid right across Australia. Make no mistake: if federal Labor is elected to federal government it will be a rerun of the same old sorry Labor story. From Whitlam to Keating, at the end of the day, all the talk and all the promises always equalled two things—budget deficits and growing government debt. The people of Australia paid the price for that in the ways I have outlined.

Labor would have the Australian people believe they can seamlessly take over the strong economy that the coalition has worked hard to help create and then try to manage it as well. This is not credible or believable. If Labor were to take the driver’s seat and grab the steering wheel, rather than continuing to calmly drive down the road of economic growth and opportunity, they would throw the gearstick into reverse, look into the rear-vision mirror and begin backtracking down the economic road we have travelled over the last 11 years. We know this because of Labor’s form in government, because of their approach to policy over the last 11 years and because of their approach and stance today on so many issues.

Labor could not cope with the discipline required for economic management when they were last in office. In their last six years of government they took net government debt from $16.1 billion in 1989 to $96 billion when they left office. Their last budget was in a black hole by $10 billion. This never stopped Labor from pledging budget surpluses while they were in office. It never stopped them from promising to pay off net government debt. They did so with breathtaking regularity. It is just that the deficits kept coming and the government debt kept growing.

In 1996, before the election, the then Minister for Finance, Mr Beazley, said:

We’re operating in surplus and our projections are for surpluses in the future.

That was one month before the election and one month before the revelation of the $10 billion black hole Labor left us. In 1990, in similar vein, former Prime Minister Keating, the then federal Treasurer, claimed that by 1993:

... there will be no government debt, domestic or external. It’s an enormous claim I can make on behalf of the Government of Australia.

Yet, as I have indicated, by the time Prime Minister Keating left office six years later net government debt had grown to $96 billion. After leaving this trail of economic destruction and losing office, you would think the Labor Party might admit some error and at least adopt a new approach. But Labor have done no such thing. Instead, here in this parliament, from the time they took the opposition benches, Labor have done what they do best—they have dug in and constructed and maintained a mindless political picket line in the federal parliament to oppose every single measure and reform needed to fix the budget and fix our economy. For 11 years they have opposed budget reform, tax reform and tax cuts, waterfront reform and all of the other tough decisions necessary to improve Australia. Today, nothing has changed. Their platform, philosophy, inexperience and volatile frontbench illustrates they have learnt nothing and, in fact—dangerously for Australia—they are pre-programmed to repeat and revisit their incompetence if ever given the chance.

Just last week we saw the policy irresponsibility in Labor’s announcement to take more than $2 billion from the Future  Fund—that is, a plan to take funds set aside for future challenges: big challenges that will confront future generations of Australians—and leave those future Australian taxpayers with the bill. This is the first admission that Labor will—as it has always done—splurge out on the national credit card big time and then leave the bill for future Australians. Make no mistake: if Labor gets its hands on the national credit card, it will be future Australians that receive the whopping bill.

But equally breathtaking is the failure of the shadow Treasurer, the member for Lilley, to protect a single policy position. As we have heard in question time and since last week’s announcement, in 2005 the member for Lilley and now shadow Treasurer said:

If you’re going to have a Future Fund it has to be a locked box.

He said:

... a future fund with money from future surpluses or asset sales ought to be absolutely locked away from government control and government influence.

Let me repeat the cast iron commitment of the member for Lilley: if you are going to have a future fund it has to be a locked box. It is the shadow Treasurer’s job to demand and maintain economic responsibility in policy making. But rather than hold his ground, he instead moved faster than a rabbit to get out of the road of the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Melbourne as they made their dash to trash the Future Fund. If the member for Lilley, Labor’s shadow Treasurer, cannot hold the ground on one policy, we all know—and the Australian people need to know—that he could never hold the ground on the tough decisions necessary to deliver surplus budgets and to maintain economic strength and financial responsibility.

But this type of financially irresponsible policy making, laden with costing errors of huge magnitude, is typical of Labor. Take the member for Lalor’s policy, the infamous Medicare Gold, the plan to take over all public and private hospital costs for 1.2 million people over the age of 75. Costed by Labor at $2.9 billion over four years, Access Economics found it economically unsustainable, with not even enough doctors to cope with existing demand. Labor allocated just $1.7 billion to pay for the hospital costs of every person over the age of 75 when the real cost was estimated at $4 billion or more. You do not need to take the word of our ministers or the members on this side of the House. This policy was described by her own colleagues as a ‘turkey’. Peter Botsman described it as having the ‘head of a donkey and body of a wombat’. Even the member for Melbourne admitted that it would have ‘added a very substantial burden to future budgets’. Given his record of budget irresponsibility in the last few days, that is indeed saying something.

But the worrying financial credentials go much further than that. Should Labor have its way it would have Senator Kim Carr, or ‘Kim Il Carr’—the name his own colleagues have ascribed to him—in charge of industry policy, despite being known as the most anti-business member of this parliament.

Labor’s vision for the future is the Australia of 1996. That is the road it wants to take us on—a road back to higher taxes, higher interest rates, wasteful spending, higher unemployment and higher deficits. Does the place of Australia in 1996 strike you as the place you would want to take your family, your business or your country? Few would agree but, unfortunately, that is the future for the Leader of the Opposition and his team.