Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is something very phoney about the Labor Party this week—and even previously, but especially this week, as we have what is most likely the last week of parliamentary sittings before an election. It came out through the last two speakers. Two days into this week, they have feigned a concern for—they say it is a connection with—the households of Australia with regard to housing affordability and the pressures households are feeling with increased prices of groceries et cetera. They have not, on a Tuesday afternoon, in what is a most valuable on-air debating period, been able to sustain that debate. They have gone right off the economics and back to what they know best—that is, personal abuse towards and personal attacks on the Leader of the Government in the Senate and the Prime Minister, no less, led by Senator Carr.

If you are going to allow Senator Carr to lead the motion to take note of answers then you are not serious about the economic debate. If there was one message given to the Labor Party at the last election, in 2004, which they ought to carry into this coming election, it was: establish your economic credentials. They are so phoney that they cannot even sustain the economic debate—a debate we will always welcome—for two days. They are so phoney in now calling themselves economic conservatives when we know that throughout the past decade of this government there was not a reform that brought the economy to the sound state it is in today that the Labor Party did not reject.

Now, they want the Australian people to accept them as economic conservatives. It was not so long ago that the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, declared himself a democratic socialist and said that there ought to be a red line through every policy of government. There is something phoney about a leader who said that no fewer than eight months ago and now wants to be called an economic conservative. There is something phoney about an opposition here in the Senate that cannot sustain an economic debate for two days and feigns a concern for mortgage-paying households but will not get up in this chamber and debate it on air.

There is something very phoney about an opposition who will not recognise that the fundamentals of this economy and this government’s policies, which they say they would support, are in good, sound order. The Leader of the Government in the Senate quoted the International Monetary Fund’s declaration that Australia’s economy is sound and one of the best in the world because of the hard decisions made to bring about those reforms. There is something very phoney about a Labor Party who, when in government, presided over 17 per cent interest rates on housing mortgages, 24 per cent interest rates for small businesses, one million workers unemployed, $96 billion in debt and so on—you know the story. They instituted those policies and now want to be called economic conservatives.

As I said, that is what they did in government. If you want to know what they did in opposition, they voted against every single reform this government introduced so as to bring about the sound economy that is now being praised by the International Monetary Fund. As I said, there is something phoney about the Labor Party, whose leader told us he was a socialist democrat eight months ago and now wants us to believe he is an economic conservative. And there is something even phonier when the shadow minister for industry is Senator Kim Carr, who runs on trust—that was the nature of his comments today: trust in the Prime Minister. His own side do not trust him, and you know it. To think that he is the potential minister for industry must send a shiver up industry’s spine. I cannot believe that, if by chance you are elected, you will ever make him minister for anything. It is a disgrace that you have him on the front line. There is something phoney about Senator Carr being the minister for industry, and you know it yourself. It is as laughable as Rasputin’s credibility in the Tsar’s court. There is something very phoney about the other side when they say they are not run by the unions yet 70 per cent of their frontbench is made up of unionists. (Time expired)