Page 3770 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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the longest partnership between a Prime Minister and his Treasurer in the history of Australia, has been a successful economic manager. When it came into office the Howard Liberal government was faced with debt of $96 billion and a budget deficit—ssomething we also faced when we came in. In fact, we had to suffer, too, in relation to Beazley’s black hole here in the ACT; it even affected us. The good news is that that debt is now paid off and the government has returned the budget to very healthy levels—in fact, the healthiest levels ever.
We now have an economy that is booming. We now have an economy that lets us do the kinds of things that I mentioned earlier; without a strong economy those things simply cannot be done without huge borrowings and placing the economy at risk of high inflation and interest rates—the kinds of running inflation and interests rates we experienced under Keating. And let us make no mistake: Australia’s interest rates have always been lower under a Liberal government than under a Labor government. There is talk about 8.5 per cent now. In 1989 it was 17 per cent under Paul Keating and Bob Hawke. That is what you are going to get if you go back to a Labor government.
These are the things that the Stanhope Labor government tries to hide from the people of Canberra. It tries to hide them by bare-chesting itself every time it disagrees with policy initiatives of the commonwealth government. It tries to hide them by diverting attention away to its own agenda. It tries to hide them too by taking the credit—indeed, all of the credit—for the ACT’s economic buoyancy. And it tries to hide them by blaming the commonwealth for its own failings. Make no mistake: we have gone backwards here because of a Labor government. We have a stressed health and education system and the look and the feel of the city is, indeed, very concerning and many people regard it as a disgrace.
We are very much behind in environmental terms. We have just had a motion on water security and one further point on that is that this government has let about 170 gigalitres—1½ years supply over and above what it needed to for environmental flows—go out of our dams. Just think what would have happened if that had not occurred. Just think what benefit the people of the ACT could have got if that had not occurred.
We also have a business community here that is constantly frustrated by the government’s basically “don’t care” attitude. We have a government that protects its windfall revenues in the face of higher taxes and refuses to give any of it back to the people; a government that is more concerned about iconic monuments than it is about the things that are really important to the people of Canberra. And what would a Rudd regime do to improve any of these things in the ACT? I want to suggest to you that it will do little more than to perpetuate the current ACT government’s inaction, wasted money and wrong priorities—and, indeed, it would cement the Stanhope Labor government’s consummate arrogance and hypocrisy. It will destroy the checks and balances that we as a community and as a nation expect from our governments.
Make no mistake about it: if a Rudd government gets in we will have for the first time Labor governments right across the country. And, if there are changes in the Senate so that the Senate goes under the control of Labor and the Greens, you will have no
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