Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

When this debate on the Appropriation (Nation Building and Jobs) Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and associated bills commenced last Friday, I am quite sure none of us expected it to be continuing today following probably one of the worst tragedies this country has faced in its whole lifetime, certainly since Federation. The debate has continued but it is pretty hard to call it a debate—it is a rather loose term because it generally takes two sides to debate and we have seen only one side of this chamber prepared to put their views and their expressions about this package in Hansard. Not one Labor senator is prepared to place their support for this package of bills on the record. It means, of course, that they have their own doubts about the wisdom of this big spend, which is going to send our country spiralling into debt. If no-one is prepared on that side of the chamber to support this package of bills, perhaps they do not support them as wholeheartedly as we have been led to believe.

I had a mate back on Yorke Peninsula who was born the same year as me, 1943, which is a fair while ago now. He owned a couple of pubs on the peninsula. He said to me a few years ago ‘Fergie, I always vote for you so-and-sos but I am buggered if I know why.’ I said, ‘What makes you say that?’ He said, ‘In those few times we have had Labor governments since I have owned hotels, I’ve always done much better because they throw money around like a drunken sailor. I enjoy the good times while they last because I know that when you blokes get in you’ll spend half your life paying off the debt.’ It seems this is what we have in store for us today.

I started primary school in 1949, the year that Bob Menzies was elected to lead the Liberal Party, and for the next 16 years he was Prime Minister. Of the last 60 years since I started school the coalition has been in government for 43 years and the Labor Party for 17. There have been only three periods of Labor government in that time. The first was the three years of the Whitlam disaster from 1972 to 1975, and I well remember it because we had 18 per cent inflation on the farm at that time. It was not easy—18 per cent inflation was not easy for anybody to handle during those three disastrous years.

I have never quite understood why the Labor Party put Gough Whitlam on such a pedestal. I guess it had a lot to do with his demise in 1975. But during that three-year period we saw the Labor government of the day taking the extraordinary measure of trying to borrow money from overseas to pay off debt. Then we got to 1983. We had 13 years of a Labor government. During those 13 years, I worked on the farm with my brother and we paid 24 per cent interest.