Page 3424 - Week 11 - Thursday, 15 November 2007
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I am not even going to speculate on the result of this federal election, but even among the people who are saying that Rudd is going to win and Howard is going to lose no-one seems to be criticising Howard for not doing a very good job. It is rather that some people are saying, “Give someone else a go.” That is probably one of the most stupid reasons you can give for changing an effective government. But even the people who are saying that they want to—
Mr Barr: It is going to be your campaign next year, isn’t it?
MR STEFANIAK: The difference is, Mr Barr, that you are not an effective government, as we saw yesterday when we were talking about the need for an inquiry into the health system, a health system that has now seen three ministers and that quite clearly has a litany of problems which an inquiry would fix—or might well fix; certainly it would do a lot more than anything you have suggested.
Mr Mulcahy: You’re next, Andrew. Don’t take it; it is a poisoned chalice.
MR STEFANIAK: You might be next, Andrew. That would be fascinating. I will make one suggestion to you: if you are, have an inquiry; have an inquiry under the Inquiries Act and then do something with the result. It worked with the Gallop inquiry.
Mr Mulcahy: He may not like the answers, Bill.
MR STEFANIAK: You might not like the answers, but at least if it is full and frank there will be something you will be able to do. There are some significant problems there, just to mention one area of government. There are also still a lot of people who are not terribly happy about all those school closures, I might point out to you. It is very much your government.
But let me get back to the crux of the matter here. It is about a piece of commonwealth industrial relations legislation. Clearly people are very comfortable with the fact that the economy is going well because of steps put in place by a very competent federal government. I just point out the fact that unemployment here is only three per cent. Youth unemployment, which used to be a very big issue, is not an issue any more. We are doing exceptionally well in terms of our national economy, and that has flowed through to the states and territories, despite some significant bungles by state and territory administrations.
In thinking about this budget, let me go back to 1992-93. We had a federal election campaign then. Unfortunately, you lot won it because of the scare campaign against the GST—which had been Paul Keating’s option C back in 1985. One thing that I recall from that campaign in terms of this issue was the significant unemployment levels. I was then a candidate for Canberra. For young people in the ACT, unemployment levels fluctuated, but in about a 12-month period they were never lower than 27 per cent and they went up to 50 or 55 per cent. That is rather scary.
One of the issues was the ability of people coming into the workforce to get a job—because of a whole swag of inefficient ways in which the federal Labor government was running the economy. Included in those problems were unrealistic industrial relations laws. Funnily enough, even the federal Labor Party seem to be backtracking
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