Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If Australians thought at the last election that they were going to get a government that was very much in the responsible Howard-Costello mould, one that would know how to manage the national economy and one that would know how to steer the Australian $1.1 trillion economy in tough economic times, they were sadly mistaken. I certainly knew that the people of Ryan were not going to risk their constituency with a Labor member and they very kindly and very generously returned me. I want to say ‘thank you’ in the parliament again and to honour their confidence and their faith.

We have today a significant, indeed profound, economic challenge ahead of us—one that requires genuine leadership, one that requires expert leadership and one that requires leadership that has, as its central features, courage and expertise. But we find, of course, in the new Prime Minister and in the new Treasurer, both from Queensland, leaders who are way out of their depth and really do not know what they are doing. I know that the people of Ryan will be deeply concerned that the government appears to be taking the budget into deficit.

I want to take my constituents to a comment by a very distinguished public commentator, one who has been in and around politics for decades. I refer to the Editor-at-Large of the Australian, Paul Kelly. Yesterday he made the following very profound and very insightful remarks. He said:

Understand what has happened here: the Rudd Government’s refusal to confront this issue is a sign of its weakness, not its strength. If the Government cannot come clean with the public during what it repeatedly declares to be the worst financial event since the Depression, then it merely underlines its lack of influence, persuasion and authority.

I think this sentence more than any other I have heard goes to the heart of both the challenge facing the government and the ineptitude of the government. Families across the country, including families in Ryan, do not want their budget to go into deficit. In 1996, when the Howard government was elected, it confronted a $96 billion black hole. That was a significant amount of money and it took nearly a decade to right it. We fear that generations of Australians will pay the price very deeply. (Time expired)