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

Well, it’s funny. What worries me is that Mr Rudd talks about turbocharging social democracy; what he has done is turbocharge debt. Perhaps that is the same thing. That is the problem. The debt has gone up $50 billion in six months. Only twice in this nation’s history—during the McMahon government and under the Howard-Costello government—has there been no net government debt. What did Mr Whitlam do as soon as he got in? He fixed that problem. He put the country back into debt. What happened when Mr Rudd got in? He put us back into debt, just like the other nine Labor prime ministers did. The one consistent fact of Australian political history, the one consistent political fact about Australian Labor governments, is debt—and there are no exceptions. What a coincidence! We know what is in Labor DNA. It is debt. There have been no exceptions. It is always the same. The Labor Party will bugger up the economy and they will expect the coalition to fix it up. It happens every time. With 10 Labor prime ministers, the coalition government to take over has been expected to fix and pay off the debt.

This is a moral question. What about the intergenerational equity? Mr Costello has spoken often about this. This is a moral issue. The Labor Party love to talk about equity, but they do not mind bankrupting our children or grandchildren to pay off the debt. It is all very well to spend on behalf of today’s voters, but who is going to pay off the debt? Our children and our grandchildren will be saddled with the debt that these people create, just like all the other Labor governments do. There are no exceptions. It is the one ironclad rule of Australian politics. They always say that the great dictators love children and hate their parents. You could never accuse Mr Rudd of that. He loves the parents; we are just not too sure if he loves the children who will be saddled with the debt that he is creating today, just as the other nine Labor prime ministers have created debt in the past. Every Labor Prime Minister puts this nation further into debt. It is the ironclad rule of Australian politics. It is absolutely disgraceful, if not scary.

Let us not forget how Labor spent their first year in office. How I remember Mr Swan, Mr Rudd and even Senator Conroy saying: ‘The economy’s overheated. The inflation genie is out of the bottle.’ They talked it down: the economy was overheated, interest rates were going up and the economy was out of control. We said, ‘Go for growth.’ They talked the economy down just at the time when it needed to be talked up, making the recession even worse. I will never forget how ‘the inflation genie was out of the bottle’—at four per cent—and things were so terrible, weren’t they! Now, a few months later, we know what economic terror is, their having talked down the economy. If they had gone for growth, they would not have had the problem. Instead, they kept talking down the economy and they failed to build up business and consumer confidence. So well done! Mr Rudd even got that wrong—first year in office: wrong.

What is the intellectual edifice behind this change from being an economic conservative? What is it based on? It is political opportunism, but this voodoo economics is based on the famous essay of Mr Rudd’s in the Monthly, which of course I have read. The philosophy, if you call it that, is unusual because it reflects an unusual state of mind. Mr Rudd’s political and economic philosophy changes at every opportunity. He was a Christian socialist. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor, was his spiritual, economic and social mentor, but he abandoned that and decided he was a neoliberal when he was after the shadow Treasurership before the 2004 election, under Mr Latham. He was trailing Mr Latham’s coat-tails through Labor caucus, saying he was a neoliberal. So he went from the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the Austrian Friedrich Hayek in a very short amount of time.

Then, upon becoming opposition leader, Mr Rudd called himself a self-styled economic conservative, and he was proud of it—very, very proud of it. Mr Rudd was so proud of styling himself as an economic conservative. He was out and proud about being an economic conservative. There was no difference between him and Mr Howard at all, really; he was ‘Howard lite’. He was an economic conservative and he loved every minute of it.

The first whiff of economic grapeshot, the first bit of real tension, the first downturn, and what happens? He drops all that. He drops Bonhoeffer, drops Hayek, drops economic conservatism and becomes a reborn social democrat all of a sudden. So he has changed four times in just a couple of years. Mr Rudd is, in a sense, Australia’s first post-modern Prime Minister, because he does not actually believe in anything. No-one I know has changes of hearts like that, except Mr Rudd—no-one at all. My old friend Senator Carr—I always have a go at him, I know—is wrong about everything, but at least he believes in something. Mr Rudd does not believe in anything. He changes his mind every second week. He is like a schizophrenic Harry Potter figure, baring his latest philosophy to some sort of focus group in Labor headquarters in Sussex Street over a Chinese meal, with dim sims. That is where he has got this philosophy from; it is pathetic. It is this sort of groupthink.

The essay in the Monthly is wrong. Not only is it based on hypocrisy; it is intellectually lazy, ignorant and wrong. Mr Rudd of course does not like talking about the fact that Mr Blair was one of the great neoliberals of the latter half of the 20th century; a Labour Prime Minister was one of the most significant neoliberals of the 20th century—as well as Mr Hawke and Mr Keating, of course, to their partial credit; I will give them that.

But perhaps even more disturbing than the shocking hypocrisy of the Labor Party adopting neoliberalism as well—even forgetting the hypocrisy—is the moral argument here. More people have been moved out of poverty in the last 20 years than were moved out of poverty in previous recorded history. More people have moved out of poverty in the last 20 years than ever before in human history. It is not because of communism or socialism or social democracy but because of free trade—yes, free trade. Free trade and neoliberalism created more wealth for the Chinese than for anyone else. The Chinese do not go on like Mr Rudd does. Mr Rudd takes advantage not only of the hypocrisy but of ignoring great moral arguments.

What the Labor Party does not seem to understand is that this is about good regulation. The fact is that the reason why Australian banks are among the best in the world is that the regulation is very good. This same system that Mr Rudd decries in Australia—the neoliberalism he criticises—is the same system that gave us the best banks in the world. So not only is this article in the Monthly pathetic, lazy and ignorant; it is just plain wrong.

And now it is worse. I understand that our high commissioners and our ambassadors are having to run around and hawk this line to world leaders. When Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom meets Her Majesty the Queen, I suppose he says, ‘Here, have a look at this article from the Australian Prime Minister.’ In Ulan Bator they probably take a translation of this article and give it to the local president, prime minister, doge or whoever it happens to be.

Our diplomats are expected to run around the world with this embarrassing little essay, which is ignorant and hypocritical. Our embassies have been changed into publishing houses these days. It is a pathetic, intellectually lazy and ignorant piece of work. To have the hide to have our diplomats running around with this! I wish they would peddle something I wrote, rather than this rubbish. Can you imagine asking our diplomats—our high commissioners and our ambassadors—to run around with this stuff? It is absolutely embarrassing. I feel sorry for them.

Who are the political legatees of this appalling ideology? Who are the people who love debt—debt being the new black to the Labor Party? Of course, in Queensland it is Ms Bligh, with $74 billion in debt. And she racked up that $74 billion of debt—guess what—in boom times. She has just had record mining receipts of billions of dollars. She has received billions of dollars in property taxes and hundreds of millions in GST. And do you know what she has done, Mr President? She has still racked up $74 billion of debt. I thought the $96 billion of debt federally in 1996 was bad. That was spread among about 20 million people. This is $74 billion spread among 4½ million people. Talk about structural debt. When will this debt ever be paid off, Mr President?

Of course, the Labor Party do not worry about that. They are not concerned about paying off the debt at all, because there is one golden rule of Australian politics: every Labor Prime Minister—from Chris Watson through to Kevin Rudd—spends more money than they raise. They leave this country with more debt. That is an iron rule of Australian politics. And this diseased DNA is now spreading to the Labor states. We have got Ms Bligh with $74 billion in debt and she does not seem to give a damn. It costs $10 million a day in interest alone to service that debt, and Ms Bligh does not care at all. (Time expired)