Senator IAN CAMPBELL (3:09 PM) —If most people listening to this debate have followed economic history in Australia in recent times, they would probably find it incredibly hilarious to hear a former member of the Keating cabinet, a close personal friend and supporter of the previous Prime Minister and Treasurer, lecturing a government that has turned Australia's economic circumstances around on current account deficits and economic management. When the history of Australia is written about this decade, about the previous government, the previous Prime Minister and Senator Cook—as one of the senior ministers in the later cabinet—it will be that of a government that took Australia to the brink of financial disaster.

Senator Cook —What a joke.

Senator IAN CAMPBELL —The only thing that is a joke is the disgraceful economic management of the disgraced former governments. The Hawke and Keating governments were demonstrably, with probably the small exception of the Whitlam government, the worst economic managers in this nation's history.

It is part of Australian history that the government led by Mr Gough Whitlam was the worst economic manager of Australia. Under it, interest rates, debt and inflation soared to levels never heard of before. There was only one other government that even came close to running up Australia's debt, interest rates, inflation rate and unemployment rates to the sorts of rates that we saw from the Whitlam government, and that was the government that Senator Cook was a part of. He sat around the cabinet table that made the decision to pull on the economic brakes to create an economic recession that saw hundreds of thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of households lose their jobs and lose their businesses.

What does Senator Cook now propose as the solution to Australia's current account deficit? Do you know what his solution is? He came in here today and said, `Why won't you spend more money?' That is the solution. It is not fundamental reform to our economic institutions. It is not for Labor to take on the hard decisions of reforming the tax system. At least to Mr Keating's credit he tried—when he was Treasurer—to reform the tax system. If you look at what Mr Keating said back in 1984 about the tax system, he saw that it was quite clear that Australia could not go into the next millennium—indeed the next decade, if you look at what he said—with a tax system designed in the 1930s.

In fact if you look at the previous government's record on privatisation, they knew very well back then that you could not go into the next decade, or even the next millennium, with major public businesses—such as Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank—and a range of such organisations in public ownership while running multi-billion-dollar deficits. But what did they do? They sold billions of dollars worth of assets.

They did that having deceitfully misled the Australian people at election after election. They went around saying, `We will never sell the Commonwealth Bank.' They promised the bank employees unions around the country that they would not sell the Commonwealth Bank. They looked at the union officials and, more importantly, at the bank employees who were members of those unions and said, `We won't sell the Commonwealth Bank but Mr Peacock or Dr Hewson will,' and then went off and sold a third of it. They said, `We will never sell any more than a third,' and then made it cabinet policy to sell the rest. Of course, we know that they held discussions—not very private any more—to go ahead and sell Telstra.

There is one thing that would have been sure if the party opposite, the Labor Party, had been re-elected in 1996 and that is that Telstra would have been sold by now, either in part or more likely broken up into small pieces and sold. So what is the coalition's solution to the current account deficit? It is to get public debt interest down so we are not paying $10 billion, year after year, in public debt interest to foreign bankers.

Senator Sherry —A GST, that is your solution.

Senator IAN CAMPBELL —Yes, Senator Sherry, a GST is very much a part of the solution. You cannot trade your way out of a current account deficit problem with a tax system that puts $4½ billion worth of lead weight around our export industries. That is what the blokes and ladies opposite, Madam Deputy President, will do when they vote in coming months against a new tax system. That is to say, we have a choice: do we export to the world or do we put $4½ billion worth of lead weight around their necks? (Time expired)