Mark Arbib (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

More Work Choices. We had Senator Abetz saying: ‘We should stay in the centre. We should not move to the left, we should not move to the right; we should stay in the centre.’ Of course, we had the shadow spokesperson for education saying, ‘We should move to the left.’ This is the current state of debate in the Liberal Party—not solutions or a plan to meet the economic crisis but a debate about ideology, a debate you cannot even get straight in your own party. I have never really been into theories. It is not something I have spent much time thinking about in my lifetime. I am more into practice and the way policies get implemented. The one thing I have observed in my time in the Senate and in my time in politics, when you talk about ideology, is that the opposite side are extreme. In terms of the marketplace, they are extremists; they are purists. Unlike Senator Mason, we actually do believe in the marketplace and we believe in capitalism, but we do not believe it should be unfettered.

There are some fantastic examples of how the Liberal Party operated in government and how they operate today. When you talk about what the Liberal Party truly stand for and about their ‘let the market rip’ and Gordon Gekko styles, there is no better icon than Work Choices, with the individual contracts or AWAs and workers losing conditions, penalty rates, redundancy and holiday pay. These are the policies of the Liberal Party and the policies of the National Party. This is the unfettered ‘let the market rip and bugger the consequences’ philosophy.

Let us look at the Liberal Party’s commitment to services and infrastructure. When countries around the world were investing in education, health and infrastructure, the Howard government was taking money out of those areas. The Howard government was stripping money from education, five per cent; stripping money from health, five per cent; and stripping money from infrastructure, 10 per cent. These are the policies of the Liberal Party, the policies of the ‘let the market rip’ conservatives. With child care we talk endlessly about the problems of ABC Learning. We do not talk too much about the policies of the other side of the chamber which allowed ABC Learning to operate without suitable regulation and to collapse, costing jobs and money and, in the end, putting the livelihoods of families and children at risk. Again, it was due to the policies of those on the other side of the chamber.