Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That must have been the longest 20 minutes of Senator Bushby’s life! I must say it felt pretty long to me. I put a challenge to Senator Bushby: I challenge Senator Bushby to go back to Tasmania tomorrow, get onto the media and tell them that you oppose this so-called reckless spending—that you oppose the government’s education revolution, that you oppose the money that has been spent on 116 schools in Hobart alone, that you are not interested in the education of the kids of Hobart. That is the challenge for Senator Bushby. Go on the radio tomorrow and say that you oppose this so-called reckless spending that is building 15 community infrastructure projects around Tasmania. Tell them that you do not want to spend the money making a better society after 11½ years of neglect under the Howard-Costello government. That is the challenge for Senator Bushby: get on the radio and be honest with the community in Hobart and say that you oppose these initiatives that a Labor government is taking to improve the infrastructure in Hobart, to improve the education facilities in Hobart and to build a better society after 11½ years of neglect by the Howard government.

Get on the radio, Senator Bushby, and tell the Tasmanian public that you oppose the $2 million that will be spent on improved lighting for Bellerive Oval, just down the road from Senator Bushby’s office. Tell them that Bellerive Oval is not to be given any support because it is so-called irresponsible spending. Tell the Hobart public that the quarter of a million dollars that this government is spending in Rosny Park alone on improving public housing through repairs is irresponsible spending. Get on the radio and tell them that should not happen either. That is the challenge for Senator Bushby. Tell them that the social housing that is being built in Rosny Park and Lindisfarne is no longer required, because it is irresponsible spending, and that Tasmania does not need these support facilities because the ideology of Senator Bushby and the Liberal Party is that the government should not intervene to assist the community at the time of the global financial crisis, the biggest crisis since the Great Depression in the thirties.

Senator Bushby has to go down and tell those 43 applicants in Rosny Park that they cannot improve the insulation in their homes, they cannot get any insulation, and it has to be ripped out. He has to tell them, ‘You can freeze in the Hobart winter and you can boil in the Hobart summer because it’s irresponsible to make your home more secure and more insulated through the government’s package.’

That is the challenge for Senator Bushby. That is the challenge for every coalition senator here: stop the rhetoric, go back to your communities and tell them that you are going to oppose it, that the money will not be spent and that your society, your regions and your communities should not be improved through the government’s stimulus package. Senator Bushby should go down to Tasmania and say: ‘We don’t want Tasmania to be at the forefront of the digital revolution. We don’t want the best broadband in the country to be rolled out in Tasmania.’ He should tell every tradesperson, every labourer, every cleaner and every other worker that, because of these stimulation packages, they should not get a job because that would be irresponsible spending. What an absolute nonsense!

When I sit here and listen to the economic incompetence across the chamber, I wonder how they ever managed for 11½ years. Then I think: ‘This is how they did it—they did nothing. They ignored the real issues in building a decent economy.’ All they can do is resort to scare campaigns about debt and terrorism. It will be children overboard writ large again as soon as you get an opportunity. You are built on fear and scare campaigns. That is in your DNA—fear campaigns for the Australian public.

We make no apologies for intervening on behalf of the Australian public when they are faced with the biggest global financial crisis since the Great Depression. What was the coalition’s answer? We know that it was to sit back and do nothing, to do what Peter Costello did for 11½ years—swing in the hammock and hope that the money would keep rolling in from the mining boom. Well, we do not have that sort of luck, so we have to actually manage the economy effectively, decisively and well. That is what a Labor government is all about.

Let’s be clear about what the scare campaign is about. The scare campaign is to try and divert the Australian public from watching the disintegration of the coalition and watching an impotent, incompetent, ineffective leader in the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull.