Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are eight minutes of my life that I will never get back, listening to the member for Bradfield. It was a tremendous performance. I think the eighth level of Dante's Inferno just has the member for Bradfield giving his 'best of' speeches. I saw the member for Reid nodding off! No, not nodding off, but he did look like he was nodding off, I might say.

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2013-2014 and related bills. Given that this was a government that was elected on a wave of nostalgia and wishful thinking, it takes something for those opposite to get up and talk about promises. All around the world a debate has been going on between growth and austerity. That is the debate around the world. Growth is about having a growing labour market, good incomes and wages growth. That is what we had in the middle of the global financial crisis—an expanding middle class, confidence in the economy and confidence in demand.

Austerity is all about cutting government expenditure, cutting wages and social security payments, cutting people's overall levels of security—and cutting taxes, but just for the rich, just for the top end. The whole idea of austerity—and it is a very simplistic notion that does find some appeal around the place—and the whole net result of it is to create insecurity and to demolish demand. It leads to a glut in savings at the top end, which tend to be parked in unproductive safe havens. The rich sit on their money, whereas the middle class tend to spend it.

That is a debate that has been going on since 1930s. Of course, whenever you discuss the 1930s you have to think about Keynes, of course, that famed economist, who said:

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Of course, we know that those opposite are the slaves to the types of views that were propagated by Andrew Mellon, who was secretary of the US Treasury from 1921 to 1932. He was impeached—impeachment proceedings were begun by the Congress because his attitude was to liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers and liquidate real estate. He wanted to purge the rottenness out of the system. He thought that the high cost of living and high living would come down. He said that people would work harder and live a more moral life; values would be adjusted and enterprising people would pick up the wrecks from less competent people. That is what Andrew Mellon said.

We know that those opposite, and particularly the Prime Minister, are slaves to this view. That is the critical thinking of it. Today, of course, Malcolm Farr wrote a very good article, I think on News.com, which was about how Mr Abbott would have handled the global financial crisis. How would our Prime Minister, the member for Warringah, have handled the financial crisis? Farr said that we can see that through his attitudes to Holden and to Qantas. We can see that there would have been, if you like, a:

… ‘benign neglect’ or ‘caring indifference’.

That is what we would have had.

But the reality is that we would have had 200,000 more people on the dole queues. We would have had more young people not having apprenticeships and not getting a start. We would have had a deeper hole in our economy, small business taxes would be higher, workers would be more insecure and the economy—particularly small business in the economy—would have suffered from lower demand, because the minute you hit—

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