Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Having observed this Prime Minister for the last nine months, the Australian public now have an idea of the kind of leader we have in this country. At first we had the slogans—the education revolution and working families—and then we had the stunts: the war on obesity, the war on binge drinking and the war on homelessness. That would have led Australians to believe that the Prime Minister was Tony Blair—in fact, a carbon copy. Some Australians were starting to think that the Rudd government was just an illusion, that there was no such thing, and that they had in fact elected the Blair government. Some are still wondering whether this was the ultimate con on the old colony by the mother country and Tony Blair has ended up running this country.

But, having listened to the Prime Minister over the last seven question times, I can assure the Australian people that he is no Tony Blair. His repetitious and tedious answers are filled with jargon, cliches and blather and they are without any semblance of sensible, common, plain English. This shows that this Prime Minister is as he was—a middle ranking bureaucrat. He looks like one, he acts like one, he sounds like one. As this Prime Minister goes about trying to rewrite the history of this country and the economic circumstances that his government inherited from the Howard government, we on this side of the House are reminded of another bureaucrat—Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984. Winston Smith was employed by the ‘Ministry of Truth’ to rewrite history in accordance with the party’s propaganda. As Winston Smith sat there rewriting the historical records to fit with the party’s pronouncements of the day so that everything the party said was ‘true’, he would shove the original records down a ‘memory hole’—in other words, to oblivion.

This Prime Minister is guilty of attempting to rewrite history. He is guilty of attempting to mislead the Australian people about the true state of the economic conditions that his government inherited in November 2007. So before the Prime Minister of Australia, aka Winston Smith, seeks to shove the national accounts from 1996 to 2007 down his memory hole, let us recall the true facts and the true legacy of the Howard government. In 1996 the Howard government inherited from the Keating government an economy that was struggling through the recession that Keating said we had to have. Over the following 11 years, the Howard government restored the economy and restored our confidence in the leadership of this country to properly manage the economy.

Let us restate for the record the legacy of the Howard government from 1996 to 2007—the legacy that this government inherited. Gross domestic product per head rose from $37,000 to nearly $49,000—that is, the nation’s wealth per head increased from $37,000 to nearly $49,000. The number of Australians with jobs rose from 8.3 million to 10.6 million. The unemployment rate was halved from 8.2 per cent to 4.2 per cent. As employment indicators are lag indicators, unemployment actually went down to 3.9 per cent. We had a ‘3’ in front of the unemployment figure—something that those opposite said was impossible. Long-term unemployment in September 2007 was a third of its level in September 1996. Just think of what that means in human terms. In September 1996, 215,000 Australian workers had been unemployed for more than 12 months. By September 2007 it was down to 72,000.

Real wages—and this is a concept the Prime Minister does not even understand, let alone care about—under the Howard government had risen by 22 per cent—that is, average wages rose faster than inflation. This was achieved by the increasing productivity of workers—and that translated into higher living standards—and by controlling inflation. During the Hawke-Keating years, inflation rose by 5½ per cent per annum. During the Howard years it fell by 2.5 per cent, comfortably within the Reserve Bank’s target range of two to three per cent.

The Rudd government has been talking up inflation as a threat and has claimed it is a legacy of the previous government. It has ignored the obvious strength of the Australian economy: sustained growth; increased employment; decreased unemployment, including the long-term unemployed; and rising living standards. Labor, in its mad rush to trash the legacy of the Howard government, went way too far with the Treasurer’s irresponsible comment that ‘the inflation genie was out of the bottle’—in other words, that inflation was out of control—and the Prime Minister’s comments about ‘an inflation monster wreaking havoc across the economy’. The Reserve Bank was placed in an untenable position and it acted to lift interest rates. But the Prime Minister and his flock of sheep bleated even louder about the inflation challenge—such was the manic desire of those opposite to blacken the reputation of the Howard government.

Many Australians are now looking back on those years as the golden years of the Australian economy. The fact is that, on 27 October 2007, the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of the Treasury and the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Finance signed the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook, which is required under the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998. That was a Howard government initiative, members would recall, in response to the previous Labor government’s refusal to admit that there was a $10 billion budget deficit. That document represented the most up-to-date economic forecast by Treasury and Finance, taking into account all government policy decisions at the time. The outlook forecast for the CPI was 2.75 per cent for 2007-08 and 2008-09, which was well within the Reserve Bank’s CPI target of two to three per cent.

Finally, as a vital legacy to the nation’s prosperity, the Howard government paid off massive debts that it inherited from the previous Labor government and established a sound financial position for the country. Members remember that when the coalition took office in 1996 it inherited a budget deficit of over $10 billion and $96 billion of government debt. While the budget was quickly put into surplus, it took 10 years to repay that $96 billion of Labor debt. By April 2006, the Howard government had repaid it in full—April 2006: national debt-free day. The Rudd government inherited zero government debt. Plus, Labor inherited net assets of $45 billion and surpluses of $94.4 billion over five years. All this was achieved as taxes and other revenues were reduced by a net $214 billion. And the Treasurer of this country has the audacity to claim that he has single-handedly created a budget surplus of $22 billion.

I remind members that all this occurred as our country was facing challenging global economic times: the Asian financial crisis, the tech wreck and the recessions post September 11. Our economy was deemed ‘the wonder down under’. The Treasurer did not create the $22 billion surplus. He inherited it, on the day after the election. Where would his claim to a surplus be if the Howard government had not put the budget into surplus year after year, repaid Labor’s $96 billion debt and invested in the Future Fund and the Higher Education Endowment Fund?

Have a look at the state of play now, nine months later: major economic forecasts in Labor’s first budget for 2008-09 for slower growth, a halving of employment growth and higher unemployment. The minister for employment cannot bring herself to inform the Australian public of the number of Australians that this government forecast will lose their jobs within the next 12 months—134,000. You are not going to hear that from the minister for employment. She does not have the courage to inform the Australian people that the government’s own budget forecasts reveal 134,000 Australians will lose their jobs in the next 12 months, confirmed in Senate estimates. Growth in real GDP is forecast to slow from 3½ per cent in 2007-08 to 2¾ per cent. Employment growth is forecast to halve. The unemployment rate is forecast to reach 4¾ per cent in the June quarter 2009, and the Reserve Bank says it will probably be five per cent. Since the budget, even these pessimistic forecasts appear optimistic. Today’s national accounts show GDP grew by only 0.3 per cent. In its recent statement on monetary policy, the Reserve Bank forecast annual employment growth of only 0.75 per cent. Unemployment in July stood at 4.3 per cent, having risen from 3.9 per cent in February 2008. And the Reserve Bank has now revised up its inflation forecast from 4½ per cent to five per cent.

In line with these poor results for the major macroeconomic variables, poor results are being reported in major sectors of the economy. These include: falls in retail trade turnover, falls in owner occupied housing finance commitments, slowing residential building approvals and slowing demand for credit. Yesterday’s building approvals report from the ABS shows house-building approvals fell by 3½ per cent in July. Concerns about job losses are heightened by a number of large and well-publicised lay-offs in manufacturing and the services sectors. Today in question time the Prime Minister could not even answer a question about the heavy job losses in the services sector.

If this was not enough, bitter and unproductive industrial disputation is resurfacing under the Rudd government. In 1997, the number of working days lost through industrial disputation was over 500,000. That is what we inherited in 1997—500,000 working days lost. By 2007, we had brought that down to under 50,000. According to the ABS, that was the lowest number of working days lost in almost 50 years. But now, with tomorrow’s June quarter figures, we are going to see a further increase in industrial disputation, with the union movement emboldened by the weak leadership of the bureaucrat that is now in charge of this country.

Worst of all, worse than all of these figures, is the astonishing loss of confidence of the Australian people in where the government is taking them. Since the Rudd Labor government came to office, business and consumer confidence has plummeted to lows not seen since the previous Labor government took us into recession in the 1990s. There has been such a succession of worsening indicators since this government came to office that it is impossible for me to summarise it in the time available.

Let’s just take one of them: the Sensis Business index for small and medium enterprises. Business confidence has fallen even further to reach its lowest level since the survey began, and perceptions of the current state of the Australian economy have fallen to their lowest level since 1993. Attitudes to federal government policies have fallen, and the reasons for the growing lack of confidence in the government were cited. I think members will be interested to hear what small business say about the Rudd government’s management of the economy. The reasons they cite for such a lack of confidence are: poor economic management, government policies working against small business, too much bureaucracy, the federal government not understanding small business and government policies affecting consumer confidence.

The Labor Party must accept responsibility for the collapse of confidence and the slowly deteriorating state of the economy. The Labor government stands condemned for its attempts to trash the economic legacy of the Howard government, for its attempts to rewrite history by deliberately distorting the economic conditions it inherited and for its inability to make a major decision, with its obsession with blaming the Howard government for its own incompetence. The Prime Minister, unlike his alter ego, Winston Smith, should admit that he is trying to erase the legacy of the Howard government. (Time expired)

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