Page 760 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 24 March 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
you should not only drop slave wages for the young, and the cutting off of benefits for the less fortunate; you should also give up trying to smash the union movement. Maybe then you could learn to work cooperatively and progressively towards lowering unemployment. The truth, though, is that you would probably be better off just giving up, each and every one of you.
The fact is that you have never cared a toss for the unemployed. When there were 700,000 people unemployed, and there was 5 per cent inflation, what was the cry from the people opposite? "You have to bring down the level of inflation in this country". We did. The Labor Government did. Now what happens? You turn around, with crocodile tears I would suggest, and say, "Oh, well, yes, maybe inflation is now down to one per cent or 2 per cent; but now we have a problem with the unemployed". We recognise that that is a problem.
The Liberal Party is full of humbug, and this Opposition is the absolute pinnacle of its deceit. It could not care less. You have never cared, and you will never be able to do anything about the unemployed. The Liberal Party is finished in the ACT. After years of soul-searching and a radical rethink of its direction, the Federal Liberal Party may become revitalised after its defeat in the last election, but that will take many years. However, the local Liberals have had it. Here is my prediction, if you want it, and you can guarantee that it is going to be a lot closer to the mark than the nonsense that you people came up with before the last election. At the next elections in the ACT you people, by and large, will disappear. You will disappear because you just do not have the answers.
Mr De Domenico, although I cannot see you, I have a bit of advice for you. It is time you jumped ship. They may have given you a bit of a whipping down to the back bench; they may have taken out some of the internal politics on you. But I will tell you, mate, that, if you continue to align yourself with them, at the next election they are going to drag you out the back door as well. The ACT people may forgive the Federal party for re-electing Hewson - I doubt it, but they may do so - but they will never forgive the people in the Liberal Party that they have elected to this Assembly for the campaign that they ran prior to the last election, which would have had the effect of creating a ghost town here. It is utter hypocrisy for you people to raise this matter as an MPI this afternoon in order to try to score some cheap political point.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.45): Madam Speaker, how incredibly galling it is to have a member of the party that was the architect of over a million unemployed Australians telling us about what we got wrong on employment. How galling it is to all those 1,052,700 people in this country who today do not have a job, in large part because of the policies of this present Federal Government, to hear Mr Lamont telling this Assembly that the alternative is not any good. I have to say, Madam Speaker, that I find that absolutely extraordinary. I think Mr Lamont knows full well that his record is nothing to crow about; that he has only a very sorry and very tatty record to go on. If the campaign just finished had been fought solely on the question of the record of unemployment and what people were going to do about unemployment, as opposed to a goods and services tax, there would barely be a marginal seat anywhere in the country still in the hands of the Australian Labor Party. It was to the great good fortune of the Australian Labor Party that the goods and services tax was an issue in this last campaign, because, if it was not, unemployment would have been the major issue, and heaven help the Labor Party in those circumstances.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .