Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In these unprecedented times Australians are reminded that our sovereignty and self-reliance are not abstract concepts unimportant to their daily lives. Australia's economic sovereignty should never be undermined by misplaced economic philosophy. The Hawke-Keating government of the eighties and nineties in the name of an ideological fantasy known as neoliberalism put through a raft of economic reforms that destroyed Australia's economic sovereignty. These reforms facilitated the takeover of our infrastructure by foreign banks, destroyed manufacturing, stole the savings of workers via superannuation and turned higher education into a degree factory that is more concerned about profits than ensuring that our children reach their potential.

The rot started when Hawke took the Tasmanian government to court, arguing that non-elected foreign bodies should have greater powers than the states. You've got to love it: the United Nations has greater power over our states today than the Prime Minister! But, then again, that's what Labor is all about: one world power. They have no respect for the rights and liberties of the Australian people.

In 1985 Keating, as Treasurer, allowed foreign banks into Australia. In that year financial corporations had $10 billion in foreign debt on their books and non-financial corporations had $35 billion. By 2008, 30 years later, financial corporations had $800 billion in foreign debt, an increase of over 80 times since 1985. This explosion in foreign debt was used to turbocharge house prices, enslaving the Australian worker to foreign banks.

Except for compulsory superannuation, no other economic policy has had such a devastating impact on our way of life. Today house prices are 13 times average earnings. In 1985 they were four times average earnings. This of course was Labor's plan to destroy worker independence, enslave the worker to foreign banks run by foreigners and force their parents to send their children to child care. This entrapment was completed by the introduction of compulsory superannuation, which further impoverished the worker, bonding them closer and closer to the hand of the communists in the government bureaucracy.

The long march of the Left continues into our individual lives today. Keating's exemption on capital gains tax on housing led to a massive overinvestment in the residential housing market at the expense of productive industries that helped destroy the manufacturing industry. Then there was the Button plan, created to make Australia competitive. In the end it only turned Victoria from a mighty manufacturing state to one where little primary industry takes place, or secondary industry—and, might I add, ending what is left seems to be the goal of Daniel Andrews. A deliberate policy of state forced rationalisation, while ending tariffs, did not produce a stronger more efficient industry. It produced nothing other than a burgeoning communist utopia, or should I say, dystopia, in the state of Victoria.

Another one of Labor's failed policies was the Dawkins plan, named after then education minister John Dawkins. Where once universities were institutions where rigorous intellectual debate, research and training took place, their combination with technical colleges pushed them down a path of becoming nothing more than degree factories.

Of course the greatest damage ever wrought on the Australian public economy was the Hawke-Keating Labor government's superannuation. With assets now reaching approximately 150 per cent of GDP, almost one-third of that superannuation is invested offshore. Superannuation has shifted money out of the real economy and out of the Australian economy. Over $600 billion in superannuation has been invested offshore. Imagine the economic dividend our country could reap if all this capital were flowing through it. Despite their assertions that superannuation was to safeguard retirement, the fact is that there are almost as many people on the pension today as there were in 1992. It has failed to deliver the very thing it promised: security in retirement.

The final destruction of the economy by the Hawke-Keating Labor government came with the decision to sell off CBA. CBA, the Commonwealth Bank, was sold for a measly $8 billion. Today it makes more money than that in a year.