Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I congratulate you on your presidency. I thought I would take the last spot on tonight’s adjournment because, now that we start the long stretch up to Christmas, I want to make a few comments and observations in this first week, if I may. Straight after an election, as we saw with the defeat of one government after some 12 years in office, the new government—probably caught by surprise themselves that they did win government, at least in the last 12 months—behaved as if they were still in opposition. I guess they had to find their feet. I must say that we were no different in our early months of office. Ministers were just finding their feet and getting across their briefs. They have to get out of a mode of opposition—of attack, attack, attack; everything is politics—into running a government; the serious business of management of a government. So, from my point of view, as one who has seen government and opposition, I quite understood. I was feeling for them, quite accepting of it.

But now the government is nine months in. This week, you would have thought we would see a government of more stature, a government more confident in its direction and a group of parliamentarians—in particular the ministers—moving away from the politics of everything and into the management of government. But we have not. What we have seen is the same old Labor Party playing politics with absolutely everything at their fingertips and still seeming utterly directionless—still with no plan and still coming in here and not taking responsibility for the economy and the anxiety that is out there. As if they do not know or understand the real anxiety—this has not been brought about by the previous government—this is a whole new set of problems. Whether or not they want to accept that they have created it, this is a whole new set of problems that they have to deal with. The buck stops right with the government, whoever they are.

So you want to take a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s book. This is all you, on the other side, seem to do. You are just mouths for the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd. If he says, ‘The genie is out of the bottle,’ you say it too. If he says ‘The economy is the previous government’s fault,’ you say it too. You seem to follow him like sheep. Mr Rudd this week has had to concede—I saw it in the parliament yesterday—that the Australian people are worse off after nine months of his government. He has had to concede that because he has been mugged by the reality that household expenditure and household wealth has slipped back some five per cent. These are Reserve Bank figures. The Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, said that, with the economic conditions under his government, Australians are worse off. Of course, he then went on and said, ‘We inherited it all.’ Typically, he would say that, wanting to blame the previous government.

No government has come into office where the fundamentals of the economy have been as strong—no government. We certainly did not. When we came into government in 1996, the voters threw the Keating government out in a landslide on the grounds of the economy. They had felt the recession and it was payback time. We took up a $96 billion debt, a $10 billion deficit and we had to adjust to that. That was our welcome to government. Your welcome to government was zero government debt. That is what you inherited: a surplus budget and a Future Fund. The fundamentals of the economy included inflation over 12 years within the Reserve Bank band and it had just fallen over the three per cent band to 3.75 per cent.

You could not make the transfer. In particular, the new Treasurer could not make the transfer—he still has not, he never will and you know it yourself—from political head kicker into the office of Treasury. That was what this government inherited: sound economic fundamentals, in contrast to what we inherited. The Treasurer attempted to wreck the economy—even before you got to your first budget—by declaring that the inflation genie was out of the bottle, egging the Reserve Bank to lift interest rates and, just by your presence, allowing the banks, in an unprecedented manner, to lift their own interest rates. As much as you attempted in your very early days, December 2007 no less, to talk down the economy and talk up inflation it really was the first budget you brought down that seriously alerted the Australian people. That is where you can basically trace, again, another unprecedented trend of lack of confidence by consumers and the business sector.

The first budget of any government sets out the direction that the government will take—indeed, the philosophy that the government will take and the mettle of that particular government. That is what first budgets are for. They are, in fact, probably the most important budget that new governments can hand down. I know our first budget in 1996 was probably the most important budget we handed down of our 11 budgets because it set the direction, the leadership and the mettle of the government. We set in place a debt regime and a privatisation regime that set the fundamentals and allowed this government in the very early days to buffer the Asian economic crisis. Thank goodness we did get about our business very quickly because that crisis came upon us very quickly. It was not the only challenge that the economy faced in our term. It faced many challenges. In fact, the Treasury faces daily challenges, but we know that the most important ones were the Asian economic crisis, September 11 and SARS.

Of course, there is buffeting going on all the time almost on a daily basis in an economy. That is why your first budget was your most important. You talked big about it and, on the night, never a truer word was spoken by the Treasurer when he said that this was a classic Labor budget. How right he was. That was a budget that introduced a new set of taxes that no-one saw coming, least of all Woodside and least of all the solar panel industry. No-one saw these taxes coming, but I guess we should have because it was a classic Labor budget. You introduced a stream of new taxes on which, I should add, the Senate has handed down this week a series of reports of the Senate inquiries on each one of those taxes. I recommend them as solid reading to the members on the other side. Read the dissenting reports because it is not just politics that is being played here. Those reports spell out the detriment of those taxes. They are inflationary taxes.

After all the talk that this was going to be an anti-inflation budget, you introduced a set of taxes to the tune of $19-plus billion. You did not decrease spending; you increased spending, which is classic Labor, of course. You have increased taxes; you have increased spending and you effortlessly—this is the most damaging part of the first budget—predicted or estimated 134,000 unemployed over the next 12 months. You have given away any ambition, certainly the ambition the previous government had with regard to full employment. That is what hurts most and we are seeing it coming through. We see the sackings in our manufacturing industry almost on a daily basis. (Time expired)