Page 3783 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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possible. What Senator Lundy said on the radio this morning was a disgusting slur and she should apologise.
I turn to the subject of the federal election and some of the slurs that have been made in this place in the last little while. The Chief Minister yesterday bemoaned the rise in interest rate repayments and how an average loan would increase by around $50 a month. He failed to take into account the fact that, as a result of Australian government cuts to income taxes, this would be offset by an average cut in taxes of around $80 a month since July this year. He also failed to mention that, as a result of promised tax cuts after Saturday’s election, by next year there would a cut to the average tax burden on Australians of $120 a month. These are commitments that we know will be kept, unlike the “l-a-w law” tax cuts that we saw from Paul Keating back in 1993.
We also have to remember the level to which interest rates rose under the Keating government. It is unfortunate that most of the people who may change their votes in the 18 to 30 age bracket were not really conscious of what was going on in the economy at that time; they were probably in their late teens or had not even reached their teens the last time we saw a Labor government. They do not realise and do not remember the “l-a-w law” tax cuts. They do not realise just how hopeless it can be under a Labor government. They will not remember the “recession we had to have”, which we will have to have again if we have the profligacy and bad management that we come to expect from Labor governments.
This is what happens across the country; you see it in and out of season. We have good economic times and people think, “Perhaps we can get rid of the people who are concerned about the economy and bring in the people who say they are touchy-feely about other issues.” They forget that they run down the budget and they run up the deficit. We will have a Beazley black hole revisited. What you then have to do is bring in a Liberal government to put the economy back on track again. This is the pattern we have seen in and out of season, and if there is a change of government we will see it again, to the detriment of the Australian people.
Federal electorate of Lindsay
MS MacDONALD (Brindabella) (6.05): I was going to speak about this on the earlier motion, but time ran out; so I thought I would talk about it now in the adjournment debate. I want to talk about the events that have occurred in the last couple of days in the seat of Lindsay, to say how sad those events are and to draw a parallel between what has happened in the last couple of days, with the distribution of a pamphlet which, according to Jackie Kelly, the retiring member for Lindsay, was just a joke a la Chaser style—a very sad joke I would have to say that really lowers the tone of the campaign, which is very unfortunate—and what happened at the election in 2004 when a few days before that election a similar situation occurred in the seat of Greenway.
At the 2004 election the Liberal candidate in Greenway was Louise Markus and the Labor Party candidate was Eddie Husic. I have always known him as Eddie Husic—I went through Young Labor with Eddie and am still good friends with Eddie—but
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