Page 537 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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Ms Gallagher was asked about employment, and she said:
There is no doubt that unemployment in the ACT will rise over the next 12 months.
We heard from Ms Gallagher today that this package was not going to create jobs; it is not a jobs-creating package. This is why it should be examined; this is why it is reasonable for the Parliament of Australia to look at this.
Do we believe there are good elements of this package? Yes, we do. There are a number of good elements of this package, which both Mr Smyth and I have supported. In fact, we came out very early and supported the insulation program, because we believe it is good policy. Anyone who believes it is reasonable to hold a gun at someone’s head and to say, “Don’t look at the detail of this $42 billion, just pass it,” does not believe in proper parliamentary process and does not believe that governments should actually be scrutinised for massive spending measures. It is quite reasonable that this is done.
Of course, we know that there is no economic plan from Mr Rudd, because we have seen his conversion over the last few months. We have seen him go from the man who backed every element of the Liberal Party’s economic policy. Could Mr Barr, Mr Stanhope or anyone else here point me to a time in the election campaign where Mr Rudd disagreed with the former government on economic policy? He adopted every one of their policies, and he differentiated on Work Choices and climate change, and that was it. He backed every other aspect of their economic policy. Now we have the born-again socialist Prime Minister who says to us that Hawke was wrong, he says Keating was wrong, he says Howard was wrong. All of these economic reforms were really just brutal neo-liberalism. It is embarrassing.
I mean, anyone who saw the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, on Lateline the other night would have seen him cringe when he was asked a question about Kevin Rudd. He was cringing. He did his best, Madam Deputy Speaker, not to laugh. Of course, we did see that toward the end of the Howard government, people like Mr Barr were actually criticising them for spending too much. So you cannot be criticised for spending too much but also being neo-liberals who are just going to leave it to market forces.
Of course, Julia Gillard does not agree with the Prime Minister in his 7700-word thesis. She says that Australia is ahead of the game in terms of its regulatory package. In terms of regulation in Australia, we are better than world class, she says. Yet according to Kevin Rudd, “Well, it’s neo-liberal. We’ve left it to the market forces. Every man for himself. Every woman for herself. We will not help.” What a load of rubbish. It has been rightly ridiculed as completely lacking in any sort of intellectual rigour. This man who sees himself as a bit of a thinker, who spends his summers writing long essays, has missed the point. It is a dishonest article. It is not based in any fact. If we take it to the logical extension, it is criticising all of his most recent predecessors, and it goes back on everything he said on economics during the election campaign. How can this man be trusted? He is a phoney, and that has been demonstrated.
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