Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I enter this debate on the motion relating to the budget and the economy rather surprised that the opposition would move such a motion in general business, especially when they talk about trying to ensure that no Australian is worse off, given their record. It was interesting to hear Senator Eggleston say that to run a good, strong, modern economy you need good policies and hard work. That is something the previous government, now the opposition, used to talk about a lot but do very little of indeed.

A number of years ago I remember speaking in this chamber about the skills shortage—the very skills shortage that plenty of members of the now opposition were prepared to admit at the time. In fact they were happy to say it was a skills crisis. I remember Senator Abetz saying that the skills crisis is a victim of our success with the economy, and I will come back to that in a minute. It is interesting that the shadow Treasurer—the shadow Treasurer who wanted to be a member of the Labor Party but did not join, thankfully—now says that the skills crisis does not exist at all. It seems very strange to me that the new opposition seems to be floundering around. They are not sure what to ditch from when they were in government, what to discount, what to abandon, what to keep and what to modify. They seem to be all over the place.

The fact is the previous government let Australia down in terms of the skills issue. They did not invest in training. They did not ensure that there were enough training programs and systems in place to identify that the skills crisis was coming. Of course, Senator Abetz’s remarks were telling, because you do not have a modern efficient economy that you have actually planned for unless you address one of the key elements, and that is ensuring that there are enough skilled workers in place to cope with the growth that a successful economy will deliver. One can only conclude that when Senator Abetz, speaking on behalf of the then government said, ‘The skills crisis was simply us being a victim of our own success,’ any economic success that the previous government had was purely accidental.

If they had planned for it, there would not have been a skills crisis in this country. The fact is they were not planning for it. They were relying on the general strength of the global economy and reaping significant rewards from that. They failed to address the skills crisis and have clearly made Australians worse off as a result. I find it strange that they are now asking us to guarantee that no Australians will be worse off as a result of the budget when they did nothing to put in place all the factors that need to be in place and well entrenched in order to run a strong economy.

Of course the same is true for inflation. When did the inflation genie get out of the bottle? It was some time ago. It was not just the Labor Party talking about it at the time. The Reserve Bank gave warning after warning to the then government about the inflationary pressures of their policies and they went on spending like drunken sailors and making promises right through the election campaign. An example of the ridiculous expenditure they were engaging in—and it was drunken sailor-type spending—was the Dairy Regional Assistance Program which gave a grant to the Indigo Cheese factory in the electorate of Indi. The former government in May 2005 gave a $426,962 grant under that Dairy Regional Assistance Program. But here is the catch—as part of the grant the former government paid an instalment of $22,135 of taxpayers’ money on 28 June 2007. The trouble is, 28 June 2007 was three months after the factory had already closed its doors.

Under the former government there was a slack regime in place for these programs. I probably will not have time to go into all the regional assistance programs which were rorted to the hilt by the previous government and by the National Party in particular. We will just concentrate on this one for a moment. Once the previous government was unceremoniously chucked out by the electorate and after seeking legal advice, the factory found that they were actually deemed to have complied with their contractual obligations even though they had accepted money three months after the factory had closed.

Just think about that, the factory shuts in May 2007, but this company under a scheme managed by the previous government still gets $22,000-odd of taxpayers’ funds just before the end of the financial year because under the contract that they had signed under the former government’s regional arrangements, you could get that money. The factory did not even have to stay open! This is the sort of program—