Page 3824 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 October 2005
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The Howard model is quite simple. It is all about lower wages; it is about worse conditions; it is about a massive rise in industrial disputation; it is about the abolition of safety nets; and it is about pushing down or abolishing minimum standards. As a worker, you may have lots of doubts about the things that you might lose, but you can be absolutely sure of one thing: John Howard will reduce your living standards.
That was in 1995, and here we are in 2005—
Mr Hargreaves: It just took a long time getting there.
MR MULCAHY: I see. Mr Hargreaves thinks he has taken a while to get there. I will tell you what: along with my 20 million fellow Australians, I am enjoying the pain and suffering of this decade while he tries to get there. We have had record levels of employment; we have had low rates of inflation. Even the unions cannot motivate people to get excited because we have got the lowest level of industrial disputes since records were kept in 1913. These tyrants in the government are going to take away rights and lower the standards of living!
What else has this terrible fellow John Howard done in 10 years? While we are suffering the pain of getting to the point of ruination, he has been responsible, with his friend Mr Costello, for increasing average real wages by over 14 per cent. What did the workers party do? The workers party got it up by 1.2 per cent in 13 years of Labor between 1983 and 1996. It is absolutely atrocious.
Many people in the labour movement felt sadly let down by the performance of Labor in that time. If you look at the voting patterns in so many areas of Australia that were once Labor heartland, particularly in western Sydney—Ms MacDonald has, I know, got a good knowledge of the Sydney political scene—we have seen people evacuate the Labor Party in droves and support the Liberal cause. Why is it? It is because they have got a home, they have got a job, they have got pay, their kids can get work, their partners can get work, the rate of inflation is down so the rate of growth and their costs of living are down. This is all the terrible stuff that Mr Hargreaves is saying that Howard has taken a while to get to—ruination.
Ms Porter talked in terms of the 1950s agenda of John Howard. It sounds bad if something is old. That is taken as sufficient condemnation. In fact, if you go back some years and see the historical performance of Australia in those periods, particularly under the Liberal government of the 1950s, you saw very, very strong economic growth, massive levels of growth in employment, low levels of inflation and low levels of interest rates.
If we want to talk about lousy performances in the past, let us look at the historical performance of Labor in the mid 1970s. That is when you should quit, Mr Hargreaves. I saw the ruination caused by 18 per cent rates of interest, businesses failing, people paying 21 per cent for business loans. All this was the result of these harebrained schemes that came from a group of people that had been out in Siberia—out of government, for so long that when they got their hands on the controls they did not know what to do.
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