David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Exactly! It is total inconsistency. The Prime Minister, in his essay, used the term ‘the emperor has no clothes’ in attempting to denounce the obvious success of the approach to economic management that seeks to encourage private enterprise and investment and to reward individual effort and freedoms. But the reality is that, in doing so, the Prime Minister has exposed himself as the emperor with no economically conservative clothes. The fact is that, in signalling a return to old-fashioned, big-spending, high-taxing, high-debt Keynesian expansionism, this government has sounded the death knell for the prosperity of Australians for generations to come.

The Prime Minister is correct when he says in his essay that this crisis may mark a turning point between one epoch and the next. But I for one will be extremely concerned if the next epoch marks a return to the failed socialist policy implemented as part of the social democratic experiments of the past. It will be our children who pay the price if the social democrats, the Keynesians and the socialists win the ideological argument now surfacing and such irresponsible economic policy rules in Australia. One need only glance briefly at the course of 20th century history to observe the failures of Keynesian overreaction. This is not to say that a review of global financial structures is not necessary, but such a review needs to be well considered and informed rather than reactionary. Two hundred years ago Adam Smith described the brilliance of capitalism. He said:

Let a man seek his own advantage; sometimes he will flourish. Sometimes he will flounder. But always, the process of innovation and failure will reward the ‘common good’.

In Smith’s words:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

The employment of self-interest to generate outcomes that advantage others is more or less the simplified central assumption of capitalism. It is beautiful in its simplicity and, despite the scapegoat role it seems to play in the event of any sort of financial crisis, humanity has not yet devised a better system.

In 1944, a meeting of like-minded individuals was called by a great man by the name of Robert Menzies. These individuals were brought together by a common belief that freedom was paramount. They sought to provide the Australian people with an alternative to the postwar socialist agenda of the then Labor government. This was a great moment in Australia’s history. This was the birth of the greatest political force for freedom that our great nation has known: the Liberal Party of Australia.