Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Nation Building and Jobs) Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and cognate bills. The blinding obscenity about this package is not that it will not actually work. That is obscene but that is not the blinding obscenity. It is not even the fact that future generations will be placed in debt for who knows how long. That is obscene but that is not the blinding obscenity. Even Labor’s financial incompetence is no longer obscene because that is part of Australia’s political folklore—we know the history of Labor governments, particularly federal Labor governments, and we are used to it. The blinding obscenity is that this government and Mr Rudd propose to push through the largest expenditure package, outside of budgets, in Australia’s history without parliamentary oversight. That is what he proposes to do and that is the blinding obscenity of this government.

If you want to know how significant that is—I am not very good with numbers but I did a quick calculation upstairs—we are talking about 42 thousand million dollars. There are, I think, 21 million Australians, so for every man, woman and child in this nation the debt immediately will be $2,000. And for every taxpayer—there are around 9,200,000 taxpayers—the contribution will be $4,565.22. The obscenity is that that debt was going to be placed on every man, woman and child and every taxpayer without proper parliamentary oversight. That is the blinding obscenity of this government. They have been in power for 15 months and already they are pushing through $42 billion without proper parliamentary oversight. That is a disgrace.

But politics is funny—it is an interesting profession. There are those who know the Labor Party well and know how they operate. Mr Latham, a former Labor leader, wrote today in the Australian Financial Review that Mr Rudd and Mr Swan:

… have jumped all over the financial crisis, not with a clear economic strategy in mind but with an urgent sense of the political opportunity it presents.

The stimulus package is about politics, much more than being about economics. Mr Latham knows that, the opposition knows that and Mr Rudd knows that, and that is a disgrace.

The problem—and my colleagues have touched on this eloquently throughout the day—is this: we now have a government that does not believe in anything. One of my favourite topics—and I will get onto this later—is this embarrassing essay from Mr Rudd. The problem is this: the Labor Party now no longer has any coherent ideology or framework.