Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are all familiar with the ancient proverb: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nowhere is this more applicable than in the field of politics. Just recently I came across a seminal speech by the Liberal Party's great founder, Sir Robert Menzies, delivered at the Camberwell Town Hall in the Kooyong electorate on 29 August 1946. The speech launched the Liberal Party's first ever federal election campaign. In so many ways, Sir Robert's words that evening could be a template for today's contest between Labor and the coalition. His statement, 'We need to return to politics as a clash of principles and to get away from the notion that it is a clash only of warring personalities,' is a battle cry relevant to today's political debate. Afraid to confront its poor record in government, Labor is shamelessly and relentlessly trying to paint Tony Abbott as Dr No, against every government idea regardless of merit. But this is without foundation. Why would we not oppose a carbon tax that was a blatant breach of the fundamental promise made just five days before the last election? Why would we not oppose a mining tax that will cost jobs and send investment offshore, increasing as it does the sovereign risk profile of our resource rich nation? And why would we not oppose the Malaysian solution when Malaysia's refusal to become a signatory to the refugee convention breaches the Gillard government's own key criteria? In each case, our position today is entirely consistent with what we said to the electorate before the election on 21 August last year—a statement which, unfortunately, does not equally apply to our political opponents.

The test for the coalition will always be what is good policy and what is in the national interest. As Sir Robert Menzies has said, the duty of an opposition is not just to oppose for opposition's sake but to oppose selectively; no government is always wrong on everything, whatever the critics may say. Menzies is right. This is why we have offered bipartisan support for the national disability insurance scheme, better resourcing for mental health services and a 2014 exit date for Australia's military commitment to Afghanistan. These are important areas where the policy positions of government and the opposition have converged. But as a party we will not and must not compromise on those fundamental issues that go to the philosophical heart of what the Liberal Party stands for—lower taxes, smaller and efficient government, freedom in the workplace and an individual's freedom to choose.

In the 1949 speech, Menzies said of the Chifley government, 'It has by way of outstanding example been most reluctant to grapple with the problem of tax reduction. This is partly because it seems to believe that the government departments can spend our earnings for us more wisely than we can, which is a common socialist delusion, and therefore that it is more important to maintain government expenditure than to reduce the taxes that maintain them.' In contrast, Menzies said of the Liberals, 'We are a tax reduction party understanding that real tax reductions would be the best of all incentives to increase effort, earnings and production.' Tragically, the Rudd-Gillard government have become addicted to spending, squandering the strong fiscal position bequeathed to them in 2007. In just four years they have taken government spending from 22.9 per cent of GDP to 26.2 per cent. They have turned a $20 billion budget surplus, $50 billion in the bank and record low inflation and unemployment into a $107 billion debt, a $250 billion debt ceiling and an interest bill of $20 million per day, which alone equates to five new teaching hospitals being built each and every year. What is more, Labor have fostered a culture of expectation with their lavish handouts from pink batts to school halls, from computers in schools to set top boxes. With the introduction of or increase in 19 separate taxes, Labor are penalising the taxpayer to fund their spending habits. It has got to a point where nobody can believe an economic promise from this government. We are told that Wayne Swan will deliver a budget surplus in 2012-13. First it was a rolled-gold guarantee. Now it is simply a pious objective. With accumulated deficits in the last four years of over $150 billion and no Labor surpluses for 20 years, how can they be believed?

In addition to expanding government debt, increasing taxes and bloating the bureaucracy with more than 20,000 new public sector employees, Labor has also reregulated our workplaces, causing a disconcerting rise in industrial disputation among our workplaces. As Menzies said in 1946, 'Strikes and other forms of direct action are the greatest facts now standing in the way of production, higher real wages and the restoration of civil freedom.' He went on to point out that Labor's reluctance to see the industrial law enforced was encouraging class war. Listening to the rhetoric of the union bosses in the recent Qantas dispute, it has eerie parallels to Menzies' important message 65 years before.

Another interesting point from Menzies' 1946 speech was his complaint that the Chifley government would do its best to avoid legitimate scrutiny of its actions with its bills 'frequently guillotined or gagged in the House' and that Labor frontbenchers would more often than not dodge questions in the House, preferring to 'retort to a perfectly proper inquiry by a volley of coarse personal abuse'. It is an accusation that any fair observer today of Labor's tactics in question time or in the parliament with regard to Labor's NBN or carbon tax legislation could legitimately make.

Sir Robert Menzies in his 1946 speech at the Camberwell Town Hall did us all a big favour. He provided a practical roadmap that applies Liberal values and philosophy to the practical issues of government. From immigration to defence, regional development to family policy and of course taxation to industrial relations, it is all there. Ironically, so much of what he said then is relevant to today's political debate and the graphic and persistent failures of the Gillard Labor government. Sir Robert Menzies and the Liberal Party may not have defeated Prime Minister Chifley in 1946 but their time and that of the Liberal Party's philosophy and values soon came, and it will too under a future Abbott government.