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

The topic I am discussing is a crisis in the Howard government. You have an accusation of crisis against the Gillard government. I am entitled to go back and talk about the crisis that was an ongoing crisis in the Howard government, and that was the incapacity of the then Prime Minister and Treasurer to get on with each other. That was a crisis, and we saw that crisis in the Howard government played out many times.

In 2001 when Costello was arguing that they should be fiscally competent, John Howard broke all previous records with $26 billion worth of new spending. It was simply spending to try and buy votes. He topped that with a new record in 2004 with $66 billion of new spending. Then he set a new record in 2007 that would be an all-time record of new spending, $128 billion, including election promises. The crisis for the Howard government was that Peter Costello did not have the courage, the capacity or the backbone to put a stop to this. So I will not be lectured by the coalition about any crisis when there was an ongoing crisis in the Howard government and that crisis was a crisis of leadership, a crisis of economic competence and a crisis that meant that this country did not take the steps that were required to deal with the big emerging environmental and economic issues that it faced.

There was no infrastructure investment. We had a crisis under the Howard government of infrastructure investment. Time and time again they were warned by the Productivity Commission, they were warned by government departments and they were warned by Engineers Australia that we had to build infrastructure in this country to take advantage of our natural resources. The crisis continued and there was no spending on infrastructure.

There was a crisis in education. It took the Labor government to fund decent infrastructure in education in this country. The Labor government had to do that. In the seat of Macquarie you see some of the schools where they had outside toilets, freezing toilets, old toilets, 100-year-old toilets still being used. The Howard government did absolutely nothing about that. Under the Howard government, there was a crisis in manufacturing. When the Howard government took over, elaborately transformed manufactures were growing. When the Howard government finished, manufacturing jobs were in rapid decline and free trade agreements were being signed with the US, putting our manufacturing industry under challenge.

The Howard government failed dismally to deal with climate change and you can see why they failed to deal with climate change—it was because people like Senator Macdonald did not believe in climate change. People like Senator Macdonald are climate change deniers.

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

He can deny that all he likes. If you look at the record of Senator Macdonald, not only on the floor of this house but at inquiries and at Senate estimates, you will see that he is a climate change denier.