Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hear references to spending like drunken sailors from the government benches. I refer to the government’s record in this area: $10.4 billion in six months—in fact, in a week—is an extraordinary performance. I have heard a lot of talk too about the big spend being good for the pensioners. Unashamedly it is good for the pensioners, but the opposition had been calling for a genuine across-the-board increase to pensioners’ rates for a period of some weeks before the government suddenly discovered that it would be a good thing to spend money in the economy so that, in that case, they could pass on their largesse to the pensioners. You have to wonder whether the pensioners would have received any relief at all if the financial crisis had not come along and given the government an excuse to spend the savings that the previous government had accumulated.

We have seen an extraordinary performance from the previous speakers as they went on a ‘hunt down John Howard’ case, dredging back over 20 years. Goodness me! They must be desperate to try and divert attention away from their mishandling of the global financial crisis.

The point I am trying to make here, amongst others, is that the government have jumped on this financial meltdown in world markets with great glee. They are now using that to justify every movement they make in government and they have abandoned the fiscal conservatism that the Prime Minister used to clothe himself with during the election campaign, when he said on no fewer than 10 occasions that he was a fiscal conservative and he would deliver a surplus to Australia. That surplus has been totally eroded, as I said, in a matter of weeks. I look forward with some trepidation to the future and wonder what this government will do under pressure during the next 12 to 18 months.

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