Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, like Senator Mason, woke up on Saturday morning, but I did not actually think we had seen the end of capitalism. I was somewhat more optimistic. I just thought that we had thrown out 25 years of this nation’s policy direction. But then I realised: no, it was only an article by the Prime Minister in the Monthly. I realised what this was. Just like it has been with all the state governments—to which Senator Arbib, amongst others, is most closely associated—the government needed someone to blame. It starts off with the state governments blaming their predecessors or the state governments blaming the Commonwealth. But this federal government could not do that. It had to find another purpose. So for the first six months of Labor being in office, we had the Treasurer acting as Major Nelson and, as I have said before, talking and dreaming about his genie. He realised after six months that the problem was that the genie was just a dream. Inflation was not the problem. As the former Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition had outlined, we had much bigger problems on the horizon. Six months after everyone else realised it was going to be an issue, the Labor government woke up and realised that there was a global financial crisis. That is okay. Governments deal with challenges.

On this side of the chamber, we came to office with a huge deficit. We had an Asian financial crisis, a collapse in the currency and a run on our neighbours’ currencies. We did not run around and do what this government is doing. For the first time ever, we have had a government running around talking down confidence. It ran around telling everyone how miserable their lives were going to be for the next two years. When we were in government, we told people the truth: ‘This is a very difficult period, but the government will help you through it. The government will take a long-term view and not a short-term politically expedient view.’ But just like its state counterparts, this Labor government is a leopard that does not change its spots. It simply says something so often that it makes it true. There are now three forms of truth in Australia: there is the truth, there is something that is not the truth, and then there is a Ruddism. A Ruddism is when you say something so often or when you make this action with your hands to make a point in front of a TV camera so often that everyone becomes so ‘on message’, due the great work of people like Senator Arbib, that you simply make it true.