Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a pathetic attempt by Senator Fifield at defending this government’s record. Let me take you back to 1995, when these words were put out in a press release by the then opposition leader, John Howard. He said:

This soiled Government is to spend a massive $14 million of taxpayers’ money over the next two months as part of its pre-election panic. Judging by information coming from within the public service, if the full communication barrage runs its course it could reach $50 million. This Government has effectively allowed the Labor Party to get its fingers into the taxpayers’ till.

They were the words of the then Leader of the Opposition, John Howard. Since he became Prime Minister in 1996, John Howard has presided over the most arrogant, spendthrift government in the history of this country. It is a government that is effectively a bunch of hypocrites when it comes to dealing with issues of government advertising and government expenditure. We are not talking about the normal government advertising that is done for defence recruitment, quarantine issues or any of those other important campaigns in the interests of the Australian public. What we are talking about, as every senator on the government side knows, is the campaigns that have been blatantly used as pre-election propaganda.

I was privileged to chair the Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee inquiry into government advertising and accountability, which reported in December 2005. That, mind you, was in the days when Senate committees were able to inquire into important issues of government accountability, unlike today. That inquiry highlighted the fact that, in the first five years of the Howard government, government advertising increased by over 40 per cent from the last five years of the Keating government. Most notably, when you take out the expenditure on such things as defence recruitment, the bulk of the expenditure was in promoting those campaigns that this government saw as important to its election prospects: the GST campaign—remember ‘unchain my heart’ or whatever it was; plagiarism at its worst—and Medicare—