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

At least Senator Abetz had the honesty to smile when he was doing that. He actually knew that this was so much rubbish that he was going on with. If you talk about incapacity to govern competently, I think the record holders in that were the Howard government. The Howard government set a big benchmark on incompetence, the incompetence of Howard and Costello, the ongoing fight between Howard and Costello. You can imagine Peter Costello going back to his staff and saying, 'Look, Little Johnny won't let me become Prime Minister.' And what did he do? He walked away from politics because he had no internal fortitude. He could not take John Howard on, he could not deliver decent economic policy, and what did he do? He just allowed John Howard to conduct a spendathon when he was in government, an absolute spendathon. There was no economic credibility, in my view, from the Howard government.

It is an absolute myth that the Howard government were economically competent. You only have to go back and have a look at the exposure that was done on John Howard and Peter Costello by Peter Hartcher. What did Peter Costello say to Peter Hartcher? He said, 'I had big fights with Howard all the time'—not just some fights but he had fights all the time with John Howard. He went on to say, 'As the party of low taxes, I thought we ought to keep the ratio of taxes to GDP low.' He might have thought that but he did not have the backbone to actually force that position through as the Treasurer. 'My view was always that cutting taxes was more important than new spending. This would be a point of argument and contention between the two of us,' he said. So here you have the so-called dream team, John Howard and Peter Costello, arguing and fighting all the time, an absolute crisis of leadership continually in the Howard government, a crisis of leadership between the two senior Liberals in government, the Treasurer and the Prime Minister.

What did they deliver? They delivered nothing. A spendathon is what they delivered. Peter Costello said that he had to give in—