Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I say to the parliamentary secretary and the minister here that times have changed. Times have changed so much that now the Treasurer and the Prime Minister need to be honest with the Australian people about the everyday costs of the emissions trading scheme. More than that, they cannot simply refer to an 820-page document, claiming that is the authoritative text that everyday Australians should access to find out about the impact of the emissions trading scheme, and think they can get away with it—an 820-page document which, even under the parliamentary computer network with all of its failings, takes a hell of a long time to print. Most Australian families would not even have 820 pages in their printer, but this is a user-friendly document from your friendly Rudd government. You will find out, via this 820-page document, exactly what the impact of Kevin Rudd’s ETS is.

The sad thing is that the document refers to an 18 per cent increase in electricity prices. Oops—the Prime Minister talked about a Treasury document citing a seven per cent increase in electricity prices. I say to the Prime Minister that that document might be floating around somewhere in that ocean of paper that comes out of the public service on a daily basis. Somewhere there might be that document. Somewhere it might actually say that electricity prices are going up seven per cent, but where?

We challenged the Prime Minister to release the document and he refused. He said it was secret and confidential. If it is so freely available to the Australian people, why is it confidential here in the people’s house? If it is so freely available and Australians are so aware of the impact of the Labor Party’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on electricity prices, why don’t Australians have ready access to that information? This smacks of obfuscation; it smacks of cover-up; it smacks of attempts to not tell the truth about the real impact on people’s lives of the emissions trading scheme.

I will go one step further. The Reserve Bank in a statement yesterday clearly outlined that one of the main reasons it did not increase interest rates yesterday was that the banks themselves had increased interest rates by more than the cash rate increase of the Reserve Bank. You know what? Somehow the Treasurer came in here—the Treasurer who refused to debate me—and gloated about the fact that the RBA did not jack up the cash rate but clearly omitted to mention that the banks had defied his own words and the words of the Prime Minister and had increased interest rates by a greater margin than the cash rate.

What does this big-talking, highfalutin government do when their words of warning to the banks are not only ignored but are treated with total contempt? Nothing. I will tell you what happens to the Australian consumer, to those people with mortgages and credit cards: their costs go up. And now that the markets are clearly factoring in two to three increases in interest rates before November this year, you will hear more of the chortling delight from the Treasurer and Prime Minister that somehow that is a lesser burden than what they inherited when the Rudd government was elected in 2007.

But you know what? We did not have 16 per cent increases in electricity prices in just one year and we did not have 14 per cent increases in water and sewerage in just one year with, in each case, overlayed on top of it, a new cost burden on Australian families. By the way, under the coalition real wages increased by more than 20 per cent and unemployment hit record lows and the economy doubled in size and we had record levels of spending on infrastructure. Not only did we double the GDP of the nation and therefore double the infrastructure spend but also, as a percentage of GDP, there was actually an increase in infrastructure spending.

All of this and the government spends more money. The government is spending more money. How absurd is it? It is as if I have been in a parallel universe for the last few months, listening to the comments of the Prime Minister today and hearing the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Mr Tanner, saying, ‘Well you can’t spend money if you haven’t got the income.’ How bizarre! What planet is that man on? I say this because here is a finance minister that has made an art form of spending money that he does not have in the bank. The government is borrowing record levels of money, as my shadow finance minister has outlined on numerous occasions including, very eloquently, at the National Press Club today.

I remind Australians of these words from Kevin Rudd:

There is a case, a strong economic case for budget belt-tightening by the national Government if we want to do our bit in budget policy to make the job of the Reserve Bank easier … to keep interest rates as low as possible.

Here we have a government that is spending record levels of money, putting huge upward pressure on interest rates and putting pressure on the Reserve Bank and the banks themselves. This mob is competing for the same money that is meant to be driving up to $160 billion of potential new investments over the next 12 months.

Even then, as our small business constituency would say: ‘Why is the government borrowing money in competition with us? Why is the government competing with us? How can I as a small business person afford to borrow money when the 800-pound gorilla with the AAA rating is in the same market, borrowing the money that I used to be able to borrow at an affordable rate?’ The net result of this is that small business has been done over by the Rudd government on a scale that Australians have not seen before. Big business has been able to raise money on the capital markets—even using the government guarantee that the banks have been provided to do so—but small business cannot raise money on the stock market. Small business cannot do that. A small business person has to take it out of their family home. A small business person, if they are going to pay down the debt that the bank demands, has to try to find the money somewhere. Yet they have got a government increasing their electricity prices by 16 per cent, increasing water prices by 14 per cent and increasing gas prices by nine per cent. They have got interest rates going up, they are about to have a new tax courtesy of the Rudd government, and somehow, gloatingly, Kevin Rudd comes into this place and pretends that Australians have never had it so good. It is absolutely shameful. Now we know that, thanks to Ken Henry, Australians are going to have to pay more taxes over the next few years to pay for the spending program of the government.

I was very interested in the Intergenerational report, and I will have more to say about this in the future. Kevin Rudd, on a seven-day escapade around the nation, thought that he could do what God could not do in seven days—and that is to create a new earth. On Rudd Earth, essentially there is a world that is dominated by productivity improvements. The problem was that the Prime Minister did not explain it. The three key principles of an intergenerational report are participation, population and productivity, but yesterday, miraculously, the Prime Minister dropped population, after he discovered that it was unpopular to have a much larger Australia with a lesser quality of life. More will be said about this over time, but I do provide this warning to the government: if your hubris has taken over after only 2½ years, the Australian people will punish you. You need to be open and honest with the Australian people about your policies and their impacts on their daily lives. No longer can Kevin Rudd run away from the argument. (Time expired)

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