Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this motion that notes that many Australians are significantly worse off today than they were just last year; that many Australians are facing difficulties due to increasing cost of living pressures; and that the government has spectacularly failed thus far to address these difficulties. In these kinds of debates obviously discussion ranges far and wide, but the Senate does have an obligation and I believe that individual senators have an obligation to make their comments and remarks at least factually accurate. Senator Hurley on three occasions in her remarks to the chamber said that the so-called inflation inherited by the Rudd Labor government was the highest in 16 years. That is just factually wrong and should be corrected. In 2000-01 inflation was 6.1 per cent due, the Senate will recall, to the biggest ever reform of our taxation system. It is simply not correct to continue to repeat as a mantra something that has no factual basis.

In 2007, Mr Rudd ran very hard on promises: he was the one who would put downward pressure on inflation; he was the one who had the magic wand to keep grocery prices in check; he was the one who would keep the lid on petrol prices. Mr Rudd led the Australian people to believe that they would be better off under a Rudd Labor government. They were sorely mistaken.

When he became Prime Minister in November last year Mr Rudd’s government inherited an economy with a healthy surplus, the envy of course of most other developed nations, characterised as the ‘wonder down under’ by the renowned publication the Economist. I should say that it was an economy that had withstood many shocks and was superbly managed by the former Treasurer, Mr Costello. But instead of using this auspicious head start and getting on with the job, Mr Rudd and the Treasurer, Mr Swan, have continued constantly to talk down Australia’s economic standing and with it of course—and we are now seeing the fruits of this—pulling down business and consumer confidence to historically low levels. This is dangerous ground that Labor is heading into.

It is clear now that, for all the talk, Mr Rudd cannot walk the walk and the rapid 2008 price rises in groceries and petrol are irrefutable proof that this nine-month old government has run out of answers. It is a government that is clearly having trouble accepting the responsibilities—and they are heavy responsibilities, as we know—that go with governing, with making decisions and taking sensible steps to keep the economy strong and growing. Mr Rudd’s failure to tackle difficult matters is evident in his government’s constant denial of any responsibility, choosing instead to blame someone—anyone but himself.

Mr Rudd is unhappily steering a rudderless ship on the economy. He has already admitted that prices are beyond his control. In rather extraordinary circumstances the Prime Minister actually admitted a couple of days ago that Australians are now worse off under his government. And when faced with the reality that he is rudderless, what happens next? Yes, the blame game starts. Out of the coalition’s first 550 questions without notice directed to Labor, Mr Rudd and his ministers have answered 422 by blaming the former coalition government. We have seen that in Senator Conroy’s notebook he does it without even trying to answer a question. Put simply, that is 77 per cent of questions and issues that are just sitting in Labor’s too-hard basket—no answers at all.

This is from the party that promised 146 times to end the blame game. This is from Mr Rudd who, before the election last year, assured Australians repeatedly that ‘the buck stops with me’. But of course now Mr Rudd is singing a very different tune. We have a Prime Minister and a Treasurer who now acknowledge that Australians are struggling. We have heard this mantra repeated this afternoon. We have heard Minister Macklin admit that families are struggling and that they are worse off now than they were just a year ago. But their response is to endlessly watch, inquire, review, buck-pass and dither but never accept responsibility for their own inept fumbling of the economy.

I am interested to hear, I must say, who exactly the imaginative Labor machine will today blame to explain this morning’s findings of the lowest level of small business confidence in any Australian government—and that is recorded: ‘in any Australian government’. I went back and had a look at the way things stood in 1995 before the Howard government took office in 1996, and this attitude of the Labor Party is eerily repetitive of old Labor and the Keating government. I am reminded of what the former Prime Minister, John Howard, said to Mr Keating in 1995—and we could be listening to it today. He said:

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer should be ashamed of themselves because nothing will release them from the burden they bear for what they are doing to Australian families.

It is clear that in the lead-up to the election the Australian people were sold a pup or perhaps a whole litter of pups.

It has become obvious that the only plans Mr Rudd, Ms Gillard and Mr Swan possess have been poached from the coalition. Mr Rudd’s framework for schools announced yesterday is of course coalition policy. The transparency aspect was revealed by the Howard government in 2004 and announced, and the teacher retention and teacher quality facet was outlined by Dr Nelson as recently as this year’s budget reply. And of course Labor had no tax policy of its own and, with only minor changes, delivered the coalition’s tax cuts when it got into government. Once Labor runs out of our policies to copycat it fills the vacuum with yet another committee or inquiry. The Labor government has I think, sadly, become famous or infamous for its reviews, committees and inquiries, and it is not hard to see why. As my colleague Senator Bernardi said in his remarks, the Rudd government has announced over 150 of them since it came to office nine months ago.

This may be just a shifty way to avoid making a decision—or 150 of them—but for a party that was in opposition for almost 12 years you would be forgiven for thinking that they might have actually had a few thoughts of their own and that they would come into government with a few policy ideas of their own and not be entirely reliant on everyone else to help them out with some. Instead, they have delayed any action on the most crucial of issues such as those facing pensioners and carers. The matter of pensioners and pension rates has of course been sent off to be reviewed amongst the myriad of other concerns encompassing the Henry tax review. The Henry tax review is not to be handed down until December 2009. It means that many of its recommendations will not even be implemented until the budget of 2010-11 at the earliest, at which point the Rudd government will have been in power for almost an entire term.

Do you get the picture here? The economy was booming under the coalition. It was Mr Rudd who tried to dismiss the Howard government’s achievements as being down to the mining boom: it all happened on the back of the mining boom and all of those proceeds were being squandered; any mug could run the economy; anyone could do it. Guess what? The mining boom is still there but under Mr Swan’s squawking there is now talk of a recession.

The sad thing is that by putting the inflation genie front and centre of their budget strategy and then bringing down an expansionary budget that inflames prices, the Labor government is hurting the hip pockets of working families, pensioners, carers and our seniors. It is these Australians who are worse hit than others. The Rudd government’s price increases on the back of tax hikes will be a difficult and unnecessary pill to swallow, considering that prices for employee households are already pushing well above the inflation rate—up 5.7 per cent in the last financial year.

The Senate should make no mistake about this. Under the Rudd government, Australians are hurting financially, but the most vulnerable sector of our community, the frail aged pensioners and their carers, are suffering most of all. Can a single pensioner existing on a fixed income of $273 per week eat a review? Of course not. What they need are dollars and cents—an immediate adjustment to assist them in meeting basic cost of living items. In contrast, under the Howard government pensions were under constant review.