Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hate to disappoint Senator Pratt, but I would like to point out that, in fact, our policies and costings are not going to be released so that they can be a template for this government to try to worm its way out of the image it has as being wasteful, mismanaging and profligate. I am afraid there is no opportunity for you to fix your terrible mismanagement reputation on the back of our policies. It was late last year when the current Prime Minister caused a great deal of derision amongst the Australian public by her wonderful line to the Labor Party conference saying, 'We are us.' The general reaction I have had is that she actually meant to say, 'We are useless.' That would have been quite true. They are useless, they are wasteful, they mismanage, they are profligate.

If you look at Labor's record to date—and I would like to thank Senator Mason and others for the information he has given us—not only have they never, ever left a surplus in the bank when they have been thrown out of office but also they have not handed down a surplus since they won office in 2007. They have accumulated $167 billion of budget deficits in less than five years. It will take the coalition government, when we are re-elected, up to a decade once again to pay off their debt.

Let us look, though, at what this wasteful and mismanaging profligate government actually means for people in the streets. When it undertook the review of the Fair Work Act, it forgot to include productivity in the terms of reference. It is no wonder it forgot. Every retail outlet and manufacturer in Australia could tell the government that productivity was the way forward. It was interesting that Senator Pratt used a number of social welfare policies as examples of what the government has done. Yes, social welfare policies are necessary and good, but hope, reward and opportunity do not come out of government handouts; they come out of government policies that give people in manufacturing, industry and small business the chance to develop their own businesses. That is where you get genuine hope, reward and opportunity—from the innovation, the entrepreneurialism of Australians—and not from government handouts.

Of course, the troglodytes on the other side did not include productivity in their terms of reference for the Fair Work review. We discovered one of the reasons in an academic survey that has recently been released that shows that the success rate for employees undertaking unfair dismissal claims against Labor's Fair Work Act is running at 51 per cent. More than half of the unfair dismissal cases succeed. That is more than 17,000 a year. The troglodytes on the other side of the house would perhaps like to suggest that this means that small business have been lousy employers.