Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

This is another example of the Liberal mythmaking machine in overdrive. As we have seen in the last 24 hours, it is another example from the member for North Sydney. According to the Leader of the Opposition, according to the member for North Sydney and according to the other spokespeople, if only the Australian people had had the good sense to keep them in office everything would be rosy. Everything would be fine—the deficit would be lower; the debt would be lower; unemployment would be lower. According to their narrative, everything would be fine if only the Liberal Party had retained their rightful place as the born-to-rule party of this nation.

But at the heart of their narrative there are two patently false claims—two claims so laughable that I would have thought the opposition would be embarrassed by the paucity of their argument and by the plain sophistry of their narrative. The first false proposition is this: the deficits would be lower in future years under the opposition’s plan, because they would not have made the direct payments to families that we made. That is proposition No. 1. They say, ‘We wouldn’t have had the cash splash, we wouldn’t have sent $900 to working families, so our deficits would be lower.’

Let us put aside the fact that those payments have been so important in keeping the Australian economy as robust as it is compared to the rest of the world. Let us look at the fiscal impact of that decision. We went down the road of payments to families because they were temporary and because they were targeted, because they would wash through the budget, because almost all the impact would be in the 2008-09 financial year and they would not be a drag in future years. And what did the opposition say at the time? They said: ‘We wouldn’t do that. We’d oppose that. We wouldn’t make the $900 payments to families.’ Instead, they said, ‘We’d have tax cuts—permanent tax cuts.’ The Deputy Leader of the Opposition called them ‘broad and sweeping tax cuts’. The Leader of the Opposition made a virtue out of the fact that they would be permanent. He even trotted out academics—John Taylor from Stanford University—to say that people need to know that the reduction in their tax is permanent so that they increase their spending. Of course, a permanent reduction in tax means a permanent drag on the budget bottom line—a different approach from this government, not temporary, not targeted, but a permanent drag on the bottom line. That means that, whereas our stimulus payments to families have no impact on the budget in the out years, theirs would have an ongoing impact. They come in here and claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility. They say, ‘We stand for lower deficits; we stand for lower debt,’ when their policy would directly mean higher deficits and higher debt. They are hypocrisy personified.

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