Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I wish to make a few comments in relation to Australia’s current economic situation and also to respond to some of the mantra that we have been submitted to, question time after question time, by ministers opposite. Mere repetition of an assertion does not turn it into a fact. Unfortunately, it seems that Senator Conroy and others opposite think that simply repeating a mantra which is clearly wrong turns it into a fact. I can assure them that it does not. The thing that does concern me is that this continued repetition might unfortunately mislead some of our fellow Australians.

The issue that I first of all want to address is the assertion by the Prime Minister and his government that they are somehow economic conservatives. Indeed, I nearly choked when I heard Mr Rudd say that he was an economic conservative—that he always has been and always will be. I invite fellow Australians to read his first speech to the Australian parliament, where he attacked for about five minutes—about a quarter of his speech, I would assume—the policies of one Margaret Thatcher. He has always been an economic conservative and yet the very first speech he gave in this parliament was designed to attack Margaret Thatcher’s policies! That is fine. That is what we expect of those from the left of the parliament—I accept that and I even respect it. But then please do not have the audacity to assert, contrary to what you said in your first speech, that somehow you have always been an economic conservative.

Then, in delivering his first budget, the Prime Minister told the Australian people that it was ‘a traditional Labor budget’. If it is a traditional Labor budget, and we are to believe that he is an economic conservative, we should be believing that Labor budgets at all times have been economically conservative.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hardly.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Nash, you are absolutely right—hardly. So Mr Whitlam’s budgets of the 1970s were good, economic conservative budgets because they were traditional Labor budgets—and the same with Mr Keating’s. This is absolute arrant nonsense.

But let us turn to some of the other statements that have been made. There was the statement that somehow the coalition wasted the years in government and the economic boom times and there is nothing to show for it. Let us analyse that. We came into government when the budget, after it had been promised that it would be at least balanced if not in surplus, was in fact $10 billion in deficit. We rectified that, despite union officials—some of whom now sit in this place as Labor Party senators—seeking to break down the doors of Parliament House in 1996 in opposition to our first budget, which sought to balance the budget, let alone bring it into surplus.

But they have always been economic conservatives, if you are to believe what they say. During the period of the Howard-Costello economic management of this country, not only did we turn the $10 billion budget deficits into surpluses but we paid off the $96 billion debt left to this country by Labor, and we also established the Future Fund. There was a net asset turnaround for this country well in excess of $150 billion. But that is just swept under the carpet and ignored as though all of it just happened by accident. We in fact took the hard and tough decisions, which were opposed every step of the way by Mr Rudd as we sought to achieve that result. And now they seek to deny it. We also of course left a legacy of low unemployment—the lowest for some 30-plus years.

Another of the statements that those opposite like to make during question time is the assertion that the then Howard government had 20 warnings from the Reserve Bank about the threat of inflation. That is interesting, because if there had been a warning to the government the statements and the comments would in fact have been public documents—they would be publicly available. The Labor opposition knew about those alleged warnings as well, yet during the election period did we ever hear Mr Rudd say that because of the Reserve Bank’s public warnings—20 of them—we cannot adopt Howard government policies. Of course not. He went to the people saying, ‘We fully support the economic management of the Howard and Costello team. We are economic conservatives.’ At no stage did Mr Rudd see these statements by the Reserve Bank as being the 20 warnings that, we are now led to believe, they provided to the Australian people. They fully endorsed our economic approach.

Another matter of some concern is the way that the Labor Party—and, I might say, they were aided and abetted by elements in the media—sought to rubbish Mr Costello’s warnings during the election campaign about tough economic times ahead. He warned that there would be some real international problems facing us. He was accused of scaremongering. He was accused of trying to scare people into voting for the coalition, and it was said that there was no basis to his assertions. Less than 12 months later, Mr Costello’s statements are now economic orthodoxy. Indeed, we hear about the international situation day after day from Senator Conroy as though he somehow discovered it. It was the Howard-Costello team that warned the Australian people about these matters. They were ridiculed and pilloried for it, but now they are shown to have been absolutely correct. Will we get an apology from Mr Rudd and the Labor Party or, indeed, some of those commentators in the media? Of course not.

But may I suggest that the real economic conservatives are not those who like to call themselves economic conservatives, because they think it is popular in the short term; it is those who have taken the tough decisions and have balanced the budgets. People like Senator Faulkner, who sits in the chamber tonight, voted in this place against the budgets and the budget measures that brought about the surpluses and the tax reform that was so vitally needed for this country.

My colleague Senator Ferguson made some suggestions earlier today about how question time might be improved. He referred to the difficulty in getting ministers to have any degree of relevance to the actual question asked. I think Senator Ferguson made some very good points. When the ministers opposite answer questions in question time, I invite them to consider the facts and the actual truths of their assertions and to not just repeat parrot-like the focus-group-tested slogans that they think might have some cut through in the electorate. It does work for a while—I will give them that—but, as former Premier Carpenter found out in Western Australia in recent times, there is only so much spin that the people of Australia will put up with. After a while they will see through it.

We have now seen Labor spin on alcopops, on the luxury car tax—you name it—but when you start prodding and scratching and having a look behind the spin there is absolutely no substance. Just this evening we were discussing the luxury car tax, which is being brought in because we have to fight inflation. That was the reason—it was going to help us fight inflation. Yet Labor’s own senators on the Economics Committee admitted that it would be inflationary. So you ask the government, ‘Why are you introducing this, because it is going to have the exact opposite effect of what you said?’ and they just dismiss it, move the goal posts and move to the next argument. Australia was left a great economic legacy, which the Rudd Labor government is now unfortunately trashing.