Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) | Hansard source

I, too, wish to contribute to this address-in-reply. If you go back, over a year now, to the beginning of this term of parliament, there were a few aspirations that the Labor government set out. I remember very clearly the focus on transparency, and the focus on trust: 'My word is my bond.' Now, how deeply disappointed the Australian population have become in the failures of this Labor government to live up to its word—to abide by its word. It is now widely considered to be the least transparent government and one of the most dishonest governments of all time.

I look at where we are economically—and I have a relatively long economic memory—and it comes to me that, actually, some pretty significant comparisons can be made between our current situation and that of the early 1990s. In November 1990, the then treasurer, Paul Keating, said those infamous words about the 'recession we had to have'. What caused that recession, that dreadful pain, for Australians? You had a government and an economy with excessive spending. You had a current account deficit of $4 billion. The current account deficit is something that's not talked about anymore, is it, Senator Scarr? It was one of the key economic metrics back then in the eighties and early 1990s that was talked about not just in economic circles but in the wider discourse of the Australian population. You had a problem with the current account deficit then sitting around $4 billion. Of course you had inflation and you had interest rates out of control. Is anyone starting to notice any parallels?

Today, Jim Chalmers, someone who was mentored by Paul Keating, is Treasurer. We've had a per capita recession for quarter after quarter after quarter. The majority of the time, in fact, that the Labor Party has been in government we have been in per capita recession. Government spending is out of control, fuelling inflation and fuelling interest rate rises. The current account deficit, again, is not a figure that's talked about much these days, but for the first quarter of 2026 it hit a record high of $27.1 billion. Going back to the 1990s, that quaint $4 billion number does seem quaint now, when we've currently hit $27.1 billion. You have to ask yourself, in that circumstance and knowing the history of the Labor Party, whether the recession we had to have is the unspoken bit at the moment, and whether Labor's deliberate policies of increasing government spending at a time of high inflation, to keep inflation higher for longer, forcing up interest rates, is not a bug but actually a feature. This is actually the government's plan. It's not incompetence; it's deliberate strategy.

The Labor government is inflicting this pain on every Australian family. Every Australian family is worse off after four years under the Labor government. They talk about tax cuts when in fact they've massively increased taxes within the economy. Bracket creep has smashed take-home pay; inflation has crushed Australia's standard of living. Interest rate rises mean that the pressure that families are under today to make mortgage repayments is worse even than that point in the 1990s, when interest rates were sitting at 17 per cent. The actual impact on family budgets is greater because people have had to borrow more to get into their house. So you've got some very serious economic challenges confronting Australia and confronting Australian people—and, quite frankly, the Labor Party is just not up to the job of fixing those challenges.