Senator SCHACHT (8:07 PM) —I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2000-2001 and related bills to make some remarks about this government and ancillary matters. It has now been just over five years since the Howard government was elected in March 1996. It has not been in any way a distinguished effort by this government. Someone said some years ago, `When this government goes, who will mourn it? Who will make the speeches to congratulate this government on its achievement?' It has often been commented that, in the years following the demise of the Fraser government, most members of the Liberal Party ended up bagging Malcolm Fraser and saying that it was seven wasted years and that they had missed so many opportunities. Some people who are now ministers in the present government had that view. When this government goes—without being presumptuous or arrogant about it; there is still a long way to go to the next election in the latter part of this year—as I suspect it will at the next election, who will mourn it? Who will remember this government's achievements? What are those achievements? The only thing this government and Mr Howard will be remembered for will be that they introduced the GST. That will be Mr Howard's place in history. If that is the only thing you can be remembered for in five, 10 or 20 years time, you have failed miserably.

Senator Abetz —And we will still have the GST.

Senator SCHACHT —That is true. Minister, we pointed out at the last election that, if you people maintained the treasury bench, we would not be able to unscramble it, that we may be able to roll back in many areas and get rid of the madness and the stupidity and the administrative nightmare that you have created with this GST, but we will not be able to get rid of it all. We told people that when they voted at the last election. The irony is that the majority of Australians—51 per cent—in the two-party preferred vote voted against the government. But we were not fortunate to get the votes in the right number of electorates—as has occasionally happened in Australian political history. In the 1990 federal election, we hung on to government with a very small deficit on the two-party preferred vote. In 1954, I think the federal parliamentary Labor Party got around 53 per cent of the two-party preferred vote and still lost the election in the seats that counted.

The irony is that the people did not vote for the GST, but the government got the governing majority on the treasury bench and the lower house and were able to introduce it. You did not get a popular mandate for the GST; you got a parliamentary majority for it and were able to introduce it with the help of certain dills in this place—unfortunately, the Australian Democrats. I suspect the present Leader of the Australian Democrats this Friday night at 10.30 will pay the price for that deal—that famous handshake and smile with John Howard—when she is dumped by the Democrats. They know that, if they go to the election with a leader who is so overtly remembered as delivering the GST to Australia, the Democrats will be punished, as will this government.

The Prime Minister said that, if he was elected, the people would feel relaxed and comfortable. It is quite clear that people are not relaxed and comfortable at all. They are uncertain and concerned and they have fear and anxiety for the future because this government has failed in so many areas to provide them with the economic security that they believe is their right, and which all ordinary Australians believe the government should deliver. But why didn't Mr Howard deliver a relaxed and comfortable Australia? Because he thought he would have to stunt any further social development, political evolution, discussions and promotion of ways to improve our society in order to focus on his GST.

I suspect his political position would have been much stronger if, over the last three years, he had admitted that he had changed his position and supported the referendum for a republic. Just as Sir Henry Parkes is called the Father of Federation—though he did not live to see it—John Howard would have been able to promote himself as, if not the father of the republic, the co-father of the republic, which would not have been able to have been denied by even those of us who have been long-term republicans. That would have been something that in five, 10 or 20 years he would have been marked up for rather than marked down for doing nothing. When people write the history—even if they make TV documentaries—John Howard will be remembered as saying no, of being the negative force, in the further development of the Australian political entity and the Australian character.

It is the same with his dealings with issues such as Aboriginal reconciliation. Despite some mealy-mouthed platitudes, everybody knows he does not have his heart in it. He takes every opportunity to make short-term political gains by making remarks against the evolution of Australia, our understanding of our Aboriginal past and the indigenous people who have been here for at least 40,000 years. I suspect that if he stood up now and said sorry most people would not believe him. He is so far gone on that issue that, even if he said something positive now, he would not be believed. In any number of areas, John Howard has failed.

Senator Abetz —Mr Howard to you.

Senator SCHACHT —Mr Howard—I am happy to accept that correction. Mr Howard is still a failure, whether he is John Howard or Mr Howard. It has been five years—five wasted years. What must be most galling for the majority of Australians is that we have elected a Prime Minister who has led a government that has stood still, has not contributed to the development of the country. The Howard government's argument was: `We are good economic managers.' The dollar is at the lowest rate it has been. If you had said 12 months ago or three years ago that a John Howard led government would take the dollar down to US48.5c people would have said, `That's impossible.' If you had said that the national debt had grown by nearly $100 billion over the five years the Howard government has been in, people would have said, `That's impossible in view of the promises made in the lead-up to the 1996 election.'

Certainly the inflation rate has stayed down. The government inherited a low inflation rate of around two per cent to three per cent. Inflation has gone up in the last 12 months because of the impact of the GST but, if you take that out of it, the government have maintained the inflation rate that they inherited from the previous government. There has been some decline in unemployment. Certainly they have not got unemployment down to the lowest levels that were reached during the Hawke-Keating years. Certainly it is lower than when John Howard was Treasurer in the Fraser government when he got it up to nearly 12 per cent. But, even on the economic front, the Prime Minister can no longer claim the credential of being a good economic manager. And with his convoluted twists and backflips over the last month and a half under the hammer of electoral Armageddon, most people have said, `Whatever he used to say previously to justify some tough decisions has all been thrown out the window now in pursuit of a third electoral victory.' People say that this further proves that in his own way John Howard is more interested in his electoral survival than in the good government of Australia.

One of the issues that flows from the performance of this Prime Minister is that at the 1996 election, in one form or another, he said, `We are not going to govern for the elite. We are not part of the elite. We are going to govern for the blue-collar battlers.' Any Prime Minister who introduced a GST cannot claim that he governs for the low income, blue-collar battlers when the compensation paid is so much less than the cost of living and when, even in the last two weeks, of the four per cent paid to pensioners two per cent was grabbed back. That sort of deceptive policy has come home to roost, just as it has on petrol—the tax on a tax, the GST being applied to the excise so that people pay more—and, similarly, on beer, about which promises were made. Promises were inferred, but never corrected at the time, that every self-funded retiree would get $1,000 and some people got a cheque for 16c instead. The inference was certainly made at the time and never corrected that $1,000 would be available to self-funded retirees and to many pensioners. So on the economic front he has lost credibility.

But when he said. `We will not govern for the elite; we will govern for the ordinary people,' we now see that he has proven himself to be part of a very select elite. The lifestyle of the Prime Minister is the most elite we have seen, running two official residences—the Lodge in Canberra and Kirribilli House in New South Wales. My colleagues in the Senate estimates committee have shown that literally hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent to make the Kirribilli residence suitable for John and Janette to live comfortably in the life they aspire to as part of the Sydney social set. It is a disgraceful arrangement. The Lodge was built to be the permanent residence for whomever was the Prime Minister. If Sir Robert Menzies—Mr Howard's great exemplar, hope, mentor—was willing for 16½ years as Prime Minister to live in the Lodge and did not even have his own private residence in Melbourne, it seems a bit odd that Mr Howard, who tries to ape him, wants to have two residences with all the increased costs.

In the total budget the costs of upgrading Kirribilli and the Lodge are not large sums, but it shows that this Prime Minister is out of touch. The amount of $5,000 for a new fridge and $50,000 for a new staircase at Kirribilli are sums of money that ordinary Australians could never spend on their own lifestyle or on their own houses, but the Prime Minister spends this amount of money with gay abandon. He is even, I understand, sending wine from the Lodge wine cellar up to Kirribilli. There is extra funding for those sorts of arrangements. He is out of touch. He has proven that he is part of a very small, narrow elite. What is that elite? It is part of the big end of town.

Whatever he may say about small business—where he came from with his family—in the last couple of years small business has taken it in the neck from this government. Whether it is the impact of the GST and the BAS—the business activity statement—or even the revised business activity statement or whether it is the increase in red tape, small business has suffered. What happened to the 50 per cent cut in red tape promised from 1996? What have we got instead? A tax bill going from 3,000 pages to nearly 8,000 pages. There are 5 million new words in the tax act since Mr Howard has been Prime Minister. This means that small business have to employ accountants and legal advisers to make sure that they comply with the new tax act. So much for the 50 per cent reduction in red tape.

I find it particularly interesting that there are a number of political commentators writing consistently in the media in Australia who take John Howard's line about not being part of the elite and criticise the former Labor government as part of an elite. They also criticise others who do not accept Mr Howard's line on a number of social, political and economic issues as being part of a self-selecting elite. We see people like Christopher Pearson, Michael Duffy, Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, Frank Devine and others—but those five in particular—consistently write as though they represent the true battlers in Australia. They are part of the smallest and most advantaged elite in Australia—99.999 per cent of Australians do not have the advantage of being able to write a column in a daily newspaper expressing their personal views, attacking whomever they like, when they like and how they like. They are the smallest, most select elite in Australia. They are very well paid for their columns. They are very well paid for the work they do. They earn incomes way beyond the male average weekly earnings in Australia of $37,000 or the median wage of $31,500. Not one of those ordinary people writes an article and gets paid that sort of money. Those commentators get paid immeasurably more, making them among the very top income earners in Australia. They are also elite in that they have a place to write and to expound their views endlessly, and they do so without any shame about consistently attacking those in the community who have the temerity to attack this government on its social policy in particular.

I note an article written by Robert Manne, who himself would accept the description that he is part of an elite, a former editor of the right-wing think tank magazine Quadrant, a person on the right who in the past, and in the example I am about to quote from, has commented that he believes Australia has to come to terms with reconciliation and the stolen generation. I want to quote his description of those journalists that I have just mentioned who, speaking on behalf of the battlers, do not claim to be part of an elite. He describes them as follows:

That is a description of those journalists and others who, in particular, attack the veracity of the Bringing them home report and attack the former Justice Wilson, the chief writer and chairman of that report. The argument of these right-wing commentators is that there were not 20,000 kids stolen; it was less than that. Well, if it were only 5,000, it would still be an abominable arrangement; it would still be an abominable policy. I find it extraordinary that these commentators say, `Well, they may have got it wrong by a quantum of 5,000 or 10,000, and if that is the case the policy was then okay.' This is a moral issue. When you take children the way they were taken over the last 100 years in Australia up till about the 1970s, it takes on a moral dimension—whether you take 10 kids or 10,000 in the way they were taken, regardless of the various convoluted explanations given by these defenders, these apologists. What happened was terrible.

I want to conclude with the attack, the extraordinary beat-up, on Lowitja O'Donoghue by a journalist called Andrew Bolt. She said maybe the word to describe what happened to her could be `removed' rather than `stolen', but she never, ever moved away from the fact that she was removed from her mother. It may have been by the decision of her white father. Most of us in Australia would now say that, if it happened to a white family without reference to the mother or the mother having access to the children later on, the way it was done was abominable. Yet Andrew Bolt wrote this up as a justification of the view that the stolen generation report was a complete myth—that there was no substance to it. It is appalling that such a beat-up could take place. Lowitja O'Donoghue should be congratulated on the way she conducted herself despite this personal and vindictive attack by Andrew Bolt. (Time expired)

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