George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—At the request of Senator Parry, I move:

That the Senate notes that the Rudd Government’s poor economic management and the 2009-10 Budget has crippled Australia’s economic future for this generation and beyond.

Eighteen months ago today, on 14 November 2007, there was what would become a very famous speech given in Brisbane at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. The person who made that speech, among other things, said this:

Today I am saying loud and clear that this sort of reckless spending must stop. I am determined that any commitments I make are first and foremost economically responsible … I have said that I will spend less than Mr Howard. I have said that I am an economic conservative. Today I deliver on each of those undertakings.

Those who circulated copies of this famous speech were so concerned to emphasise the message that in the circulated copy the words ‘this sort of reckless spending must stop’ are bolded to reinforce the point lest anybody miss it. Mr Deputy President, you and other senators have probably worked out who the maker of that famous speech was. It was none other than the then Leader of the Opposition, Mr Kevin Rudd. He was delivering the Labor Party’s policy speech for the 2007 election—one of the great con jobs in the history of Australian politics. Only 10 days later, as we all know, the Australian people fell for it. They elected Mr Rudd as the 10th Labor Party Prime Minister of Australia.

When the Australian people on 24 November 2007 elected Kevin Rudd to form a new government, they knew very little about him. They knew less about him, in fact, than they had known about any previous prime minister of Australia. They had seen him perform very articulately and fluently in the media as the Labor Party’s foreign affairs spokesman. But he had only been in parliament since the 1998 election. He had the briefest track record in public life of anyone the Australian people have elected as their prime minister. So he was, to the Australian people, very much an unknown quantity.

But they took him at his word; they took him in good faith, because, notwithstanding all the obscurity about Mr Kevin Rudd, there was one thing they knew about him for sure, one thing they were very confident about—that is, that he was an economic conservative, that he was a fiscal conservative, and that any government Mr Kevin Rudd led would be a government which was dedicated to keeping the budget in surplus and avoiding reckless spending. The reason they knew that was that the Australian Labor Party had been so concerned to emphasise that point. The main message that came from the Labor Party throughout 2007, from the time Mr Rudd was elected as the Leader of the Opposition on 2 December 2006, was that a Rudd government would be an economically prudent government, a Rudd government would be a fiscally conservative government, a Rudd government would be a government which would be very careful with the nation’s purse strings, and a Rudd government would be a low-spending Labor government. They even made an expensive series of television commercials showcasing Mr Rudd standing attractively on a farm gate with the beautiful countryside of Nambour in the background saying, ‘The badge of fiscal conservative is a badge I wear with pride.’ So they knew that and they went on to elect him.

One thing that was very notable about the 2007 election was that, of all the issues that were before the people—whether it be climate change, industrial relations or the longevity of the Howard government and the ‘time for a change’ factor—one thing that was not a big issue in the 2007 election campaign was economic management. That was because, as every commentator you could think of at the time observed, the Labor Party had very, very carefully and deliberately made sure there was no distance between their policies and the fiscal policies of the Howard government so as to eliminate economic management as an issue. As my colleague Senator Barnaby Joyce once famously said, if Kevin Rudd had got any closer to John Howard, he would have had to ask Mrs Howard’s permission.

I know that the history of politics is replete with many examples of promises unfulfilled, of assurances vacated and of politicians who do not live up to what they represent themselves to be, but I dare say there would be scarcely an example in the long history of Australian politics of a political leader whose public representations of himself, of his position, of his commitments and of his beliefs were further at variance from the reality than what we have seen in the last 18 months in the case of Mr Kevin Rudd and his ministry. As we know, last Tuesday Mr Rudd’s Treasurer and colleague Wayne Swan delivered a budget which was not merely a big spending budget, not merely a reckless and extravagant budget, but the most reckless and most extravagant budget and a budget which reported the worst bottom line of any peacetime budget in Australian history. It was a budget that projected cascading deficits for four years into the future of $188 billion.

Sometimes in political debate or when we listen to economic commentators we toss these figures around and the word ‘billion’ sort of—