Page 746 - Week 02 - Thursday, 12 February 2009
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MR COE (Ginninderra) (11:58): A leopard never changes its spots. The Labor Party we see today is the same Labor Party that gave us deficit, debt and the recession we had to have. This time the electorate was promised, after a long campaign, that this Labor Party was different from all the others—that those in the Labor Party had learnt the lessons of their ways and were now for a great liberalisation of economics: that free markets provided the opportunity for all Australians in this new world.
Federally, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, even found time to tell us about his change of view on YouTube. He told us this in numerous YouTube videos. I read one out yesterday, but here is another one: “Kevin Rudd’s vision for Australia”. Vision for Australia? I wonder if it is huge debts? We will see. “Today, I’d like to talk about my plan to secure Australia’s long term prosperity.” Long-term prosperity? I wonder if he included in that long-term prosperity a debt-laden economy—$200 billion of debt, $7 billion of interest payments? Maybe. Then he used the good old line which he has used before: “Some call us the lucky country, but I believe you make your own luck.”
You make your own luck. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that true of those opposite here today? Mr Stanhope, the Treasurer and all his team made their own luck. They made the ACT what it is today. They made the ACT economy what it is today. They may talk about how progressive they are; they may talk about how they wave the flag at all the COAG meetings and brag about all our progressive laws. But what do they brag about in terms of the economy? Do they brag about our public works expenditure? Do they brag about our great infrastructure around town? I doubt it. There would not be too much to brag about. They could brag about the prison perhaps, the Belconnen Remand Centre—
Mrs Dunne: Or Tharwa Bridge.
MR COE: Or Tharwa Bridge. They could. What about the GDE? What about pay parking in the hospitals? All these are great Labor developments—champagne Labor.
Mr Seselja: Rhodium.
MR COE: And Rhodium. We cannot forget Rhodium. We cannot forget Rhodium—that great indicator of affluence. They set up something called Rhodium and then just squandered it. They have got money to burn—$42 billion. If you lose $100 million on Rhodium, you have still got $41.9 billion left, so who cares? Who cares?
Kevin Rudd goes on to say, “We can’t just hope the resources boom lasts forever.” It certainly has not lasted forever. In the midst of some pretty tough times, we are now seeing Labor’s true colours. In the lead-up to the first Rudd government budget, we saw the Prime Minister declaring the need for a large budget surplus and the need to fight the inflation genie that had been let out of the bottle. It had been let out of the bottle, apparently. Then we had the summer holiday. We had the big summer holiday. The Labor Party evolved, was reborn. The Prime Minister had an epiphany of some sort, I guess. The great leader decided to grace us with his thoughts in a 7,000-word essay used to justify his abandonment of economic conservatism with a selective and convenient quoting of economic history and a conclusion that does not provide a solution but instead suggests why the new world order might be called some sort of social capitalism—a third way.
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