John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Being new to the Senate, as you are well aware, I would like to look back on the 12 months of the Rudd government and the many things that were promised. Like Senator Sterle, who was reading a piece of paper, I read this piece of paper: ‘Kevin Rudd will fix our hospitals. Justine Elliot and Kevin Rudd: new leadership in health policy will fix our hospitals.’

Before going on to the hospitals, I will remind the Senate of a couple of things. I hear so much about interest rate rises. I can recall the 25.25 per cent I was paying under the Hawke-Keating government and the then so-called ‘world’s greatest Treasurer’. We talk about these eight or 10 interest rate rises of increments of a quarter of one per cent at a time. Back in November 1987, if my memory serves me right, there was a two per cent interest rate rise in one day. It took how many years under the Howard government to have that amount of interest rate rise?

Of course, unemployment followed, up to 11 per cent—a million people were out of work. Those working families were thrown onto the unemployment heap by the then Hawke-Keating government. We hear a lot about working families. I must say that I have a bit of a chuckle when I look across the chamber and I think of the shearers, the Australian Workers Union, under the Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine, who started the Australian Labor Party. I look across there now, and not one of them would know how to load a handpiece, let alone knock the wool off a sheep. I stand here proudly as the only shearer in the chamber, knowing what back-bending hard work is about.