Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise on this, the first anniversary of the election of the Rudd Labor government. I support Senator Mason’s very sensible, timely and appropriate motion and reject the accusations made by Senator Arbib. Most peculiarly, in particular, he attacked the education system of this country, which, as he should know better than anybody, is the responsibility of state Labor governments. It is state Labor governments that should be wearing the shame of the state of the public education system in this country. Contrary to what Senator Arbib said in his contribution, the Labor government is the most fortunate in the history of this country. As Senator Mason quite properly said, it inherited an economy and a budget that were the envy of the rest of the world. That was the result of 11½ years of extraordinarily hard work by the former government, of which I was proud to be a cabinet minister for nine years. I know full well the extraordinary work it took—with no help from those on the opposite side—to resurrect this economy and to leave the budget in the extraordinary shape which this government has inherited.

This government inherited a budget which is absolutely and utterly debt free—with $96 billion of debt wiped out. When we came to government, we were paying $8 billion a year in interest on the debt which Labor left us. That was more than was being spent on education or defence. That was an extraordinary record for the Labor government, which we had to work so hard to eliminate. We returned the budget to surplus and, in all but two of our 11½ years, the budget was in surplus. We made full provision for the unfunded superannuation liabilities of this nation, which no government before us, in the 100-odd years of this country, had ever done. We fully provided for the $90-odd billion worth of superannuation which we owed to our former soldiers and public servants. So this government came into government in an extraordinarily fortuitous situation, thanks to the work done by its predecessor—of which we on this side are very proud.

What the Labor Party did in coming to government, and in its extraordinary campaign through 2007, was to raise the expectations of the Australian people to extraordinary heights, in an amazingly irresponsible way, which it must have known it could never possibly live up to. We saw a sequence of rash and irresponsible promises made by the party that is now in government, throughout the course of 2007, behind the smiling visage of one Kevin Rudd.