Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently, I was struck by a comment made by the Prime Minister during the summer recess. At an Australia Day reception, in talking about the former Howard government, he said:

... the concerns that I expressed before coming to government about the budget spending that occurred throughout much of the past decade. The aftermath of higher budget expenditure during the late 1990s and in the 2000s makes it tougher to deal with the long-term budget impacts of ageing of the population.

In making those comments, the Prime Minister was harking back to comments made three years before by his then shadow minister for finance, the now Minister for Finance, Lindsay Tanner, when he said: ‘the complacency and a lack of discipline by the Howard government has allowed unnecessary spending to flourish’.

When I read those comments from both then and three years later, I was rather struck by the lack of authenticity of those statements and the incongruity of those statements with what I understood to be the general approach of the Australian Labor Party. I know that Mr Rudd has dressed himself in the clothing of the economic conservative in recent years, but when I thought about what they had to say it did not seem to quite ring true. So I went back and had a look at the previous sitting period to the period in which Mr Tanner made that comment about the lack of discipline by the Howard government on the question on spending. I read the Hansard of both this place and the other place to get a flavour of the extent to which Labor members and senators seemed to conform to the line that Mr Tanner was running and which has been repeated by the Prime Minister.

On 8 February 2007 at 9.21 in the morning, Mr Gavin O’Connor rose to tell the parliament how the public investment in vocational education, training and skills formation was deficient and that there needed to be more of it. At 11.45, Mr Hatton got up to say that there should be an Australian coastguard and that it should be properly funded. He called for a department of homeland security. At 1.01, Senator O’Brien got up to say that the government was not spending enough to make an adequate investment in programs to underpin the sustainable growth of the aquaculture industry. At 1.38, Ms Elliot in the other place called for more spending in health. At 2.09, Senator Stephens criticised the lack of childcare centres and the lack of government assistance for child care. At 2.41, Senator Sherry criticised the interest rate hikes and called for government assistance to help people who were at risk of repossession due to higher mortgage rates. At 3.19, Mr Stephen Smith called for investment in education to be improved at every level from primary through to university. At 4.50, Ms Hall called for more government assistance in welfare-to-work programs. At 6.15, Senator McLucas called for more investment in disability services in Australia. And so on—we have not even got to the dinner break yet.

Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And I didn’t get a mention.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You were there somewhere, Senator Moore. I did not get to you. You were probably after dinner. You were not alone. There were many colleagues of yours vying for attention in this particular exercise. So where do we get this line from the Labor Party that there was too much spending and that we were uncontrolled spenders when we are also told by various members and senators rising in the ordinary course of their business in this place and the other place that we were not spending enough in government?

That confusion has continued to today. Only today, we were told by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Conroy, that the former Liberal government had ripped a billion dollars out of health. First of all, the claim is not true—we did not rip a billion dollars of health. But even if we had ripped a billion dollars out of health, wouldn’t that have been precisely what Mr Tanner was calling for in March of 2007 when he talked about the Howard government needing to be disciplined about unnecessary government spending? Perhaps we are misrepresenting the Labor Party. Let us be fair.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education and School Curriculum Standards) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don’t be that!

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I cannot help it, Senator Mason: I have to be fair. Maybe the Labor Party was saying that we were spending too much in the wrong areas and that they had better areas in which to spend the money, and that accounts for the differences in their approaches. I suppose that we can only test that by looking at what Labor has actually done in government. We will be able to see what coalition priorities they have put aside to replace them with Labor priorities when it comes to spending.

Before the last election, the Labor Party told us that the coalition was spending too much on consultancies. The Labor Party, we were told, would cut consultancies by $395 million. What happened? In the first full year that Labor was in government, spending on consultancies increased by 5.6 per cent to $454 million. We were told that they would save money by having proper business plans before any major spending proposal was undertaken. What happened to that when it came to the rollout of the National Broadband Network or the Julia Gillard memorial school halls? It disappeared in a puff of smoke. So much for the business plans.

Let us look at what they did to deal with other areas of what Mr Tanner might have called wasteful coalition spending on things like income support for students. Apparently, we were wasting money by supporting all those rural and regional students with youth allowance, so they decided to cut it when they came into office. They did not mention that before the election, mind you, but they discovered that that was part of the wasteful spending of the Howard coalition government. They said that they would not cut private health care. That was not part of our wasteful spending when in government. But of course that is exactly what they have decided to cut since coming to office. Cataract surgery was apparently wasteful coalition spending that needed to be cut, along with solar panel rebates, reproductive technology rebates et cetera. And the list goes on.

22:07:05

Mr President, if you want the best illustration of how confused, how dizzy, Labor’s policy on cutting wasteful expenditure was, you have only to look at the ultimate resort that they made to the efficiency dividend. When in opposition, Labor repeatedly and consistently criticised the 1.25 per cent efficiency dividend applied by the Howard government as being lazy decision-making: ‘You could not work out where the appropriate areas of government spending to cut were, so you just brought in a 1.25 per cent efficiency dividend.’ What did Labor do when they came into office? Not only did they retain the 1.25 per cent efficiency dividend but in their first full year of office they actually increased it by two percentage points, to a 3.25 per cent efficiency dividend. That is the discipline that Mr Tanner was talking about.

The fact of life is that we are yet to see the true colours of the Australian Labor Party. It is spending unprecedented amounts at the present time, but it claims to be doing so because there is a global financial crisis. We will see as this government goes on—if we are unfortunate enough to be lumbered with that prospect—just what its policies are in the long term. But I think that in February 2007 all those members and senators I was quoting were in fact the authentic voice of Labor on the question of spending. When they called for more to be spent on health, education, border security, disability services, training and so on and so forth, they were speaking for the Labor Party that we have known for many, many decades. That was the Labor Party that always spends more than the coalition and that simply cannot control itself.

Spin aside, the Rudd government is now spending more than any previous government in Australian history. Spending as a proportion of GDP reached its peak during the years of the Hawke and Keating governments. Something like 27 per cent of GDP, as at the time the Howard government left office, had dropped to 24 per cent of GDP. So much for it being a big spending government.

The deficit, as we know, today has reached dizzying heights. Under Whitlam the deficit reached 1.8 per cent of GDP, in the 1982-83 recession it reached 3.3 per cent of GDP and in the 1992-93 recession it reached 4.1 per cent of GDP. What does it stand at today? It stands at 4.9 per cent of GDP. That is the authentic voice of Labor. That is the record of the Labor Party. They spend more than they can afford, they run up deficits more than they can afford, they mount up more debt than the Australian community can afford and we will all be the legatees of that appalling policy. So, please, do not come into this place and lecture us about the lack of discipline in Howard government spending or any Liberal government spending. It just does not ring true. (Time expired)