Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It is indeed a pleasure to join in the address-in-reply to His Excellency the Governor-General’s speech to parliament of what is now some weeks ago. In extending my best wishes to the Governor-General, can I say what a magnificent job he has done as Australia’s leader over a long period of time. I particularly want to thank him for the very visible visit he made to Townsville recently—principally to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Royal Australian Regiment, of which he was a distinguished leader at one stage in his military career. I thank him for the way he interacted with the Townsville community. He attended a youth forum that the Mayor of Thuringowa, Councillor Les Tyrell, put on; and I certainly hope that Councillor Les Tyrell is the new mayor of Townsville City after next Saturday. The Governor-General and his wife were very gracious visitors to that North Queensland city and demonstrated the sort of interest the Governor-General has taken in Australia since becoming our leader.

The Governor-General delivered a speech, which of course was written by the current government, and I want to refer to some aspects of that speech and some aspects of the program that the new government raised in that speech. The new government made a great virtue of attacking inflation. Not only did Mr Rudd pinch all of the coalition policies when he was opposition, but having gained government he seemed to again be following what our government did in 1996. In 1996 our government came in with a $96 billion debt confronting it. There was a $10 billion annual deficit and there were huge problems in the economy created by the Labor Party. We rightly pointed out that we had this huge government debt to address.

Mr Rudd, thinking of those times, thought he had to try and find something he could blame on the coalition and blame his inexperience on as he got into more and more trouble. He anticipated he would need a peg to hang his hat on in relation to blame. Having promised, of course, that he was finishing the blame game—a promise that was as shallow as most of Mr Rudd’s other original promises—he then picked on inflation. With the help of a very compliant media, he has raised the issue of inflation in the attention of the Australian public. However, what he has forgotten to mention, of course, is that the last Labor government that we had had inflation running at 10 per cent—double-digit figures—when we came into government 11 or 12 years ago. Labor simply cannot be trusted with management, as shown by their record over the last term of the Labor government, with huge interest rates—up to 17½ per cent. I carry my bank statement with me because younger people these days do not believe me when I say that I was paying 17½ per cent on my housing loan, but I have got the bank statement to prove it.

So Mr Rudd picked on this fictitious claim about inflation running out of control. Inflation is an issue—it is one of the issues that the Howard government addressed and one of those that would have been carefully handled had we retained office. But Mr Rudd will really need to think of another blame game issue rather than the inflation one, because we know from Labor’s last experience in government that they will be looking at inflation in the double-digit area and thinking of it as normal.

The government’s comments about economic reform are a lot of fluff. I think it has been clearly demonstrated over the last 100 days that to be a fiscal conservative you have to do more than just mouth the words. The new government has become, I think, quite well recognised in the first 100 days as being good on the rhetoric but finding it a lot more difficult to put that rhetoric into action. As Senator Barnett mentioned in the speech before mine, the government’s comments about work and family in the address by the Governor-General are clearly easily forgotten by the government as it sets out to penalise those who are more vulnerable in our society, the carers and the elderly. I am delighted that Brendan Nelson has led a campaign that has reversed the decision of the Labor government to slash payments to carers and the elderly.

With education—and a lot was made of this in the Governor-General’s speech—we see that rather than assisting with education the new government seems to have gone out of its way to attack education. The very popular—and not only popular but very useful—Investing in Our Schools Program has been slashed by this government. One wonders what those state schools, Catholic schools and independent schools are going to do for the assistance they needed, which was not being provided by the state governments—who do have primary responsibility for education. In the health area there were a lot of promises by the Labor government. There was a health ministers’ get-together—a bit of a powwow; a bit of a chat—a week or so ago. What came out of it? Nothing except the chat. They agreed to have another chat at some time in the future to see if they could address the problems.

A lot was made, in the government’s speech, of climate change and water. As I have mentioned in this chamber previously, Australia produces less than 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. If you shut Australia down tomorrow, it would not make one iota of difference to the changing world climate. We are part of the globe, and Australia’s miniscule emissions will have no impact on the changing climate of the globe. What we have to do to address that, and what the previous government was doing, is to show leadership, as demonstrated at APEC, where we got the big emitters to the table and made sure that they started thinking about it—because only by getting the big emitters to the table and getting them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions will we have any chance of changing the dilemma that we are looking at with world climate change.

The Governor-General’s speech on behalf of the new government mentioned a lot about social inclusion and Indigenous policy. Well, we see that the best thing that could have happened to Indigenous people, the intervention in the Northern Territory, is already being wound back by this government. I simply cannot understand that except by thinking that the government is being pressured by certain forces inside the Labor Party to take action which is really not in the best interests of our Indigenous brothers and sisters in Australia.

In relation to that, Mr Rudd was very keen to talk about the forcibly separated Indigenous children. As it turned out, there are other, non-Indigenous Australians who were also forcibly separated from their parents in the prewar and early war years—60,000 of them, the subject of a very good Senate report a couple of years ago. I have written to Mr Rudd and asked him when he is going to apologise to those non-Indigenous Australians who were forcibly separated from their parents and when he is going to consider compensation for those people. I have had a most dismissive letter—not from the Prime Minister, to whom I wrote, but from one of his parliamentary secretaries—arguing about whether an adviser had committed to doing something about this some time ago. That is an issue which must be addressed by the new government, and I will certainly be working with the Care Leavers Australia Network to try and get something done to acknowledge the hurt of those forcibly separated Australians who were not Indigenous people. Mr Rudd seems to have one set of policies for one lot of Australians and a different set for another lot. Perhaps it is an issue of which one might get him the best publicity at any particular time.

Governance and transparency were highlighted by the Governor-General on behalf of the new government. We heard a bit about the 2020 Summit that Mr Rudd is convening. Before the election, apart from pinching all of the coalition government’s policies, Mr Rudd also indicated he had a plan for Australia. We knew he was going to set up a lot of reviews, committees, task forces, boards and inquiries, but we did actually believe him, most Australians believed him, when he said he had a plan. We now find out that he had no plan at all and that he is going to get together a group of Australian people—the ‘best and brightest minds’, he says—to provide this plan for him.

In doing this, Mr Rudd has selected a steering committee that comprises a group of academics from the ‘golden triangle’ of Canberra-Sydney-Melbourne, with the exception of the Hon. Tim Fischer, who will bring some sense and a different perspective to the organisation of that conference. But there is no-one from the minor states on the steering committee, no-one at all from Northern Australia and, apart from Mr Fischer, no-one from rural and regional Australia. So this think tank of 1,000 ‘best and brightest minds’ obviously means the best and brightest minds that happen to live in the golden triangle of Canberra-Sydney-Melbourne.

To make sure that no-one from the north of Australia can get to the summit, we find that the initial advice—this is probably going to change, like most other things with Mr Rudd—is that there will be no expenses provided and no attendance fees paid. So that is great if you happen to head a major company, be a university academic, be one of Mr Rudd’s mates from business or be someone like Mr Rudd with millions of dollars behind him who can travel around Australia without assistance. But for ordinary people from Northern Australia being able to get to this conference would be just impossible. Mr Rudd probably does not know, because when he goes north he flies in a taxpayer funded government jet, that ordinary people have to drive for many hours to get to an airport, then they have to change aircraft three or four times, and they have to be away from their work for three or four days, to put in a couple of days attendance at any conference in Canberra, Sydney or Melbourne. These things were not considered, of course, because this conference is going to be for the golden triangle elite that Mr Rudd will be looking to to give him the plan that he did not have.

All in all, quite contrary to the Governor-General’s speech, which indicated that this new government was committed to bringing a fresh approach, committed to being a government that listens to the Australian people and committed to being a government with a vision for Australia’s long-term future, none of those urgings are in fact at all accurate. This is a government with no plan, little interest in Australia’s future unless you happen to live in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra, and it is certainly not a government that is bringing fresh ideas to the table. The only new idea so far seems to be great slashes in funding to the most vulnerable in our society. I hope that the first 100 days are not the benchmark by which this government will be judged.