David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Every responsible government in the world knows that the prescription being laid out by those opposite is nonsense. The IMF knows it; the World Bank knows it; the OECD knows it; every leader of Australian business knows it; the Treasury and the Reserve Bank know it; virtually every leading academic knows it—everyone knows it, it seems, except those opposite. Even the British Tories know it. The only people in the world who want to argue that depression is preferable to debt and deficit spending are the US Republican Party and their faithful followers opposite.

Tonight I hope we find out what Mr Turnbull really thinks Australia ought to be doing. I hope he puts those opposite out of their misery by making it clear that he is not a total economic Luddite—the role that Senator Brandis and those opposite have tried to take on today. I hope he will reassure us that, if he were in government, he would not be cutting spending by $200 billion but would instead embark upon the same responsible course that the Rudd government has embarked upon: prudent borrowing, responsible countercyclical spending on important infrastructure projects, capacity building and protecting as far as possible in an open market the jobs, the homes, the businesses, the farms and the investments of the Australian people. That is the opportunity Mr Turnbull will have tonight—to engage in a thorough re-education of his Senate team, who have become the true radicals in this debate and who offer an economic prescription that flies in the face of the lessons of history and flies in the face of what is happening in the rest of the world.

If Mr Turnbull does not take that opportunity tonight, if he follows instead the path of complete political fantasy, if he continues to rely on the Liberal Party strategists hunkered down in the dungeon I described earlier— (Time expired)