Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

I had forgotten about that, Senator Bernardi. The 1980s and 1990s were about governments saying no. The government and political leaders in this country on both sides of politics—at least until 1996—said then that they could not stand between the people of Australia and the rest of the world. They said that they could no longer protect a dying car industry that was making cars that no-one wanted to buy. Let me use a simple example: who in Australia today wishes that they could go down to their local Retravision store and pick up an $800 19-inch colour television set? No-one does. We are dramatically better off for having opened trade barriers. We are dramatically better off due to having freed our economy up and having given people the choice to spend their money in the way that they choose, not in the way that the government chooses.

The difference between this government and the governments from the 1980s and the 1990s is clear. For 70 or 80 years in this country, the government tried to tell you what you could buy through punitive tariffs and quotas, which made alternatives expensive. It penalised primary producers and miners for decade after decade to protect people in the cities. This government might not want to reinstitute those same trade barriers but it still wants to tell you what to buy. It wants to say, ‘Don’t use your air conditioner on a hot day.’ I recall, Acting Deputy President Fisher, the Premier of your home state, and sadly he is still the Premier, on a particularly hot day—it was 45 degrees—in February 2009 in the weeks leading up to the tragedy of Black Saturday in my home state and that heatwave saying something along the lines of, ‘People should seriously reconsider whether they need to use their air conditioners today.’ Can we consider the absurdity of that statement? No-one buys an air conditioner for a 25-degree day. The idea that we should tell people, many of them mothers with children, senior Australians and retirees, that that day is the kind of day that they should reconsider using their air conditioner when it was going to hit 45 degrees is laughable. It is like us going back 50 years and telling people not to turn the fridge on.

The people opposite, along with their Green allies, are seeking to determine personal, private and individual choices. They constrained the development of technology and measures like generation capacity for decades to somehow justify the contrived market that they seek to create. They talk about electricity prices, but they will not allow supply to be added to. They talk about prices on carbon, and yet do not understand that their ability to measure and police it is virtually nil.

The 1980s was an era of deregulation. It was an era of privatisation. It was a lot easier before 1996, when we were sitting on this side of the chamber. That era involved the government telling people that it cannot solve their problems and asking people to take more responsibility. As I said in my maiden speech in this place, this government is throwing away the legacy of the 1980s and the thousands of people who lost their jobs and careers, particularly in manufacturing, and made legitimate sacrifices for future generations. This government is seeking to institute other forms of control over the economy, all of which have a dramatic cost, not the least of which is their idea that somehow a profit is super and the government should be able to take extra from it.

I have noticed that this government has lately compared the carbon tax to the floating of the dollar. I do not understand how they cannot see the irony. They cannot see that not having the scientific or testing means to measure or set a carbon limit that is enforceable is the opposite of the government nearly 30 years ago saying that they were unable to set the level of the dollar. This government thinks that it is omnipotent and that it can set all things in the economy. Paul Keating used to say that he could pull the levers. These people think that the economy is a keyboard that they can jump on. All of this government’s alleged reforms involve it doing more, taxing more and telling Australians how to live and what to choose a lot more. That is something to which this opposition is committed to keeping at the forefront of Australians’ minds. This government wants to tell you what to eat. It wants to tell you where and when you can drive. They want to tell you where you can use an air conditioner. They have overweening hubris and no sense of their own limitations.

This government has capitalised on what one could call ‘expressive politics’. It does not matter what you actually do. It does not matter that, tragically, people died in the home insulation bungle. It does not matter that billions were wasted on the school halls fiasco. It only matters what you ‘care’ about. Platitudes and ‘caring’ are the easiest things for politicians to do. Actually sitting down and doing things and making sure they work, that they respect the needs of the community and that they represent value for money for taxpayers is the hard bit, and that is what this government has been an abject failure in. In the address we heard last year there was no indication that the government had learnt that lesson whatsoever. This is a government that seeks to define itself purely by its aspirations, where what it aspires to is more important than the actual outcomes. It seeks to defer, delay and obfuscate any sense of measurement of what it has actually achieved.

But, as well as eventually bringing about the end of this Labor government—about which I am confident—there is something more concerning about this: this is actually reducing public faith in the political process. This government said that, if you argued against the BER school halls waste, somehow you were against education. Who in the Australian community did not think there was a better way to invest $13 billion in our education system than putting school halls over schoolyards, in some places that were ill-fitting and overpriced? I could think of some. My mother is a teacher; my uncle is a teacher. I am particularly passionate about this. To think what we could have got for that money, which can never be regained: it is a tragedy for every Australian child that will go through those schools.

When it comes to the environment, despite its vilification of those sitting on this side of the chamber, I do recall that it was not those sitting over there to your right, Madam Acting Deputy President, who had a policy on climate change going into the election—other than a citizens assembly, which we tend to force people to go and vote for. That was rightly ridiculed. It still even shocks me that someone who was Prime Minister, or someone who works in a Prime Minister’s office—or whoever came up with the idea—would even conceive that, during a campaign for an election to the national parliament, we should randomly pick a focus group and play with the agenda to contrive a particular outcome. That is the real danger: as slogans become more important than outcomes, it reduces faith in the political process. This side of politics is committed to outcomes, and we will stand against the contrived slogans of this government as well as its long-term threat to the wellbeing of the Australian economy and the liberty of the Australian people.