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

I would not have gone so far as to call his essay claptrap, but if you would like to label it that then I will accept that. The Prime Minister is railing against the economic paradigm which he only last year so warmly identified himself with. Sixteen months ago, he went to the Australian people saying words to the effect: ‘I am an economic conservative. I won’t take the budget into deficit. You can safely vote Labor because, when it comes to the economy, we won’t do anything different from what the coalition has been doing.’ Yet here we have this self-professed economic conservative, in an essay for the Monthly, laying into the balanced, commonsense approach to government management of the economy so successfully practised by the coalition government and, to a limited extent, by the Hawke and the Keating governments—an approach that has placed us in what is almost certainly the best position of any nation in the world to tackle this crisis.

I find this backflip, this flip-flop, this complete turnaround, to be completely breathtaking in its enormity. I also say that I do not find it at all surprising. This is because I never believed our Prime Minister when he stood with his hand on his heart and told the Australian people that he was an economic conservative and that Labor promised more of the same. My suspicion, shared by millions of Australians, is that, in politics, the less scrupulous will sometimes say what they need to say to be elected. I am reminded of the overheard and widely reported comments by the now Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts during the campaign, ‘We will say what we need to to get elected, but we will change it all when in government.’

There is no clearer evidence of that than the words of our Prime Minister in his essay in the Monthly. Here we have our ‘economically conservative’ Prime Minister declaring that he is a social democrat. I understand that he has since also declared that he is both an economic conservative and a social democrat.