Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

Recently, I was struck by a comment made by the Prime Minister during the summer recess. At an Australia Day reception, in talking about the former Howard government, he said:

... the concerns that I expressed before coming to government about the budget spending that occurred throughout much of the past decade. The aftermath of higher budget expenditure during the late 1990s and in the 2000s makes it tougher to deal with the long-term budget impacts of ageing of the population.

In making those comments, the Prime Minister was harking back to comments made three years before by his then shadow minister for finance, the now Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner, when he said: ‘the complacency and a lack of discipline by the Howard government has allowed unnecessary spending to flourish’.

When I read those comments from both then and three years later, I was rather struck by the lack of authenticity of those statements and the incongruity of those statements with what I understood to be the general approach of the Australian Labor Party. I know that Mr Rudd has dressed himself in the clothing of the economic conservative in recent years, but when I thought about what they had to say it did not seem to quite ring true. So I went back and had a look at the previous sitting period to the period in which Mr Tanner made that comment about the lack of discipline by the Howard government on the question on spending. I read the Hansard of both this place and the other place to get a flavour of the extent to which Labor members and senators seemed to conform to the line that Mr Tanner was running and which has been repeated by the Prime Minister.

On 8 February 2007 at 9.21 in the morning, Mr Gavin O’Connor rose to tell the parliament how the public investment in vocational education, training and skills formation was deficient and that there needed to be more of it. At 11.45, Mr Hatton got up to say that there should be an Australian coastguard and that it should be properly funded. He called for a department of homeland security. At 1.01, Senator O’Brien got up to say that the government was not spending enough to make an adequate investment in programs to underpin the sustainable growth of the aquaculture industry. At 1.38, Ms Elliot in the other place called for more spending in health. At 2.09, Senator Stephens criticised the lack of childcare centres and the lack of government assistance for child care. At 2.41, Senator Sherry criticised the interest rate hikes and called for government assistance to help people who were at risk of repossession due to higher mortgage rates. At 3.19, Mr Stephen Smith called for investment in education to be improved at every level from primary through to university. At 4.50, Ms Hall called for more government assistance in welfare-to-work programs. At 6.15, Senator McLucas called for more investment in disability services in Australia. And so on—we have not even got to the dinner break yet.