James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have had many different Kevin Rudds. I think this was the first Kevin Rudd. I am going to quote lines from a speech on 14 November 2007 at the Labor campaign launch in Brisbane. It is a crime scene where he gave this speech, a pure crime scene. He said:

Today I am saying loud and clear that this sort of reckless spending must stop. I am determined that any commitments I make are first and foremost economically responsible.

He made this big show and dance, like a Las Vegas showgirl, about how he was some type of economic conservative. He was anything but.

It is in the DNA of the Labor Party: they get into office and they cannot control themselves. I feel sorry for them; I think they need counselling or some type of help. They get into office and they spend, spend and spend. If you look at the history of this country, it is the Labor Party, now with their good friends the Greens, who constantly destroy the economy. Look at 1931: when we got back in after Joseph Scullin we had to clean up the mess. Look at 1949: we stopped the Labor Party from trying to nationalise the banks—imagine the damage that would have done to the economy. Look at 1975: the damage of Gough Whitlam—Saint Gough. Look at what he did with that three-year Labor administration—compared to the administration in this country between 2007 and 2013, it was probably quite a good Labor administration—the second worst Labor government on record. We had the Hawke-Keating government, which left this country in 1996 with $96 billion worth of debt. We got to 2013 and, once again, the cavalry came along. We had the Liberals and Nationals, the coalition, elected to clean up Labor's mess. And it is Labor's mess. They not only failed to understand how to run a business, how to look at profit and loss sheets, but they also are—

Senator O'Sullivan interjecting —

union barons—thank you, Senator O'Sullivan—who are very good at spending other people's money. When I say 'other people's money' I mean spending their union members' money. So when they get into power it is like they have won Gold Lotto every Saturday night. When Labor are in power they think, 'We've got all this money to spend and we can spend it on all our crazy schemes'. Let us talk about the carbon tax and how that did not work; let us talk about how it destroyed the Australian economy. Let us talk about the mining tax, the world's craziest tax since the Georgians had the window tax. This tax raised very, very little money. The carbon tax was a tax on families who wanted to have things like electricity so that they could operate televisions, fans and turn the oven on—