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

He has declared war on poker machines, on porn, on doping in sport and on bankers’ salaries. He is fighting everyone but there is no action. That is the type of government we have running our economy, and it is really starting to show. The bungles are all there, and they came very early. Mr Rudd claims that Gough Whitlam is his political hero and that he models himself on him. Well, he is doing a fine job, because there has not been a worse bungler since Gough Whitlam.

Mr Rudd’s first mistake was to make Mr Swan, his old classmate, the Treasurer. This is the man who, when people had their life savings frozen indefinitely—and they are still frozen—notoriously made the comment that they should go to Centrelink. That is the Treasurer we have up there, who we all know is out of his depth. In the first months of this government they launched a political attack on the previous government. For sheer political reasons and with no interest in running the economy soundly or taking up the reins of national responsibility, they talked up inflation. To that end, the Reserve Bank reacted. The government egged the Reserve Bank on to lift interest rates. Within the first three months, by February, interest rates were going up and working families were being hurt badly. It was around February-March that consumer and business confidence plunged. That was prior to the major effects of the global subprime crisis hitting our shores. We already had a crisis in consumer confidence. We already had interest rates notching up and inflation being talked up. That was their second mistake.

Let us go through their bungles: they appointed the wrong treasurer and then they started to talk the economy down and inflation up. And they got the reaction that hurt the very working families they said that they represented. What were the immortal words of the Treasurer when their first budget came along? He said, ‘This is a classic Labor budget.’ All of a sudden we saw about $19 billion of taxes that were not talked about before the election. I do not remember them being talked about before the election. They did not say that they were going to lift taxes by $19 billion. They called their first budget a classic Labor budget, and that is what the Australian people got—taxes on alcopops, luxury cars, condensate and passenger movement. A whole array of taxes, unannounced prior to the election. That is a classic Labor budget, and then consumer and business confidence plunged even more.

Post budget, the full effect of the subprime crash hit our shores. Before I get on to the—