Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to reflect on the government’s management of the economy. When it comes to managing the economy, we have a government that is completely out of its depth. We have a government that has not got a clue what it is doing. When faced with one of the most, if not the most, significant global economic downturns, it is behaving like a rabbit in the headlights. Let us just reflect on the events of the last two years. The Australian people were deceived before the last election into believing that Kevin Rudd would be an economic conservative. They were deceived into believing that, under Kevin Rudd, they would have the same responsible economic management as they had experienced and benefited from under 12 years of the Howard-Costello government.

What happened after the election? Let us reflect on the events. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister, for political reasons, talked up inflation and talked up interest rates so that they could find something to undermine the economic legacy of the Howard-Costello government. Of course, it was purely for political reasons and what they did was actually bad for the Australian economy. Then we had Labor’s first budget. Today we have had Kevin Rudd saying, ‘We protected the surplus in our first budget.’ Let us read the fine print: $20 billion worth of additional taxes and a $15 billion increase in net spending. Taxing, taxing, taxing, spending, spending, spending is the history of the Labor Party in this country and the history of social democratic administrations, as the Prime Minister now wants to describe them, around the world. The reality is this: trying to spend your way out of trouble always ends up in tears.

So what have we got? We have a government that went on a pre-Christmas spending spree, which clearly has not worked. People in my home state of Western Australia are saying to me: ‘What is happening in Canberra? They are pissing all this money up against the wall and have nothing to show for it.’