Senator EGGLESTON (3:46 PM) —This is the strangest taking note of answers that I have ever experienced in the time that I have been in the Senate. We have had talk about the GST on tickets not being refunded.

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT —That, I would remind you, Senator Eggleston, was what the answer to the question was about.

Senator EGGLESTON —Indeed. We have gone from that to Ansett and regional Australia, support for Ansett, Coles Myer, the GST, the sale of Telstra and regional areas—and on and on it has gone. It is all over the place. It is very strange indeed. It is a bit like ALP policy—a grab bag, like a dog's breakfast, of all sorts of little issues with no overall plan or consistency. It is just like things scattered on a board. There is nothing clean, simple and straightforward about it. I think this is the lesson to draw from what has been said in the Senate this afternoon: the ALP does not have a clear view about what should be done to manage the issues that face Australia today.

Senator Mackay got up and said, `Why doesn't the government put up $200 million and save Ansett?' That is $200 million for an airline that is something like $3 billion in debt. Who is going to meet the debt, Senator Mackay? Who is going to meet the cost of re-equipping an airline which was so utterly and badly managed? It had no less than nine different kinds of aircraft. Sir Peter Abeles thought the airline was a toy to play with and he would get a few different kinds of aircraft, forgetting about the cost of maintenance and running an airline with such a wide number of different aircraft in its fleet. Paying $200 million is a drop in the bucket and it will not do anything to get Ansett back in the air. Ansett has a lot of problems. One of them, sad to say, is that it was grossly overstaffed. Qantas has a lot fewer staff, and its costs per air mile flown are about 30 per cent lower. That tells a story in itself. Ansett failed because of mismanagement. It failed not just because Air New Zealand took it over and sucked it dry and transferred all the parts and equipment in recent weeks to New Zealand but because the airline itself was mismanaged. A lot of that probably comes back to union demands.

I agree that the failure of Ansett is a national tragedy, but it is quite wrong of Senator Mackay to imply that this government is not concerned about it and, in particular, that this government has not sought to restore services to the regions. In New South Wales, Hazelton are back in the air and from my point of view most importantly we have Skywest back in the air. The interesting thing is that Skywest only needed a guarantee of about $3.5 million to get it back into the air. The Skywest management group running this airline approached the Western Australian ALP government run by Dr Gallop and that government declined to provide the money to get Skywest back in the air. But the federal government provided the guarantee. The federal government, Mr John Anderson and Mr Howard have been responsible for restoring full Skywest services to the eastern goldfields and the south of Western Australia. So you cannot say with any kind of credibility that this government is not seeking to overcome the deficits in the regions caused by the closure of Ansett. On the broader picture, the government is doing its best to find a solution. I believe there are no fewer than five bidders, including airlines like Lufthansa and Singapore, as well as a union group and other groups interested in buying and seeking to restore Ansett.

The general issue of this debate is the GST. The GST has been a great success. It is one of the greatest tax reforms this country has ever seen. Australia, almost alone among the OECD countries, did not have an indirect tax system. We needed to transfer from a direct to an indirect tax system, and John Howard, to his great credit, was brave enough to do it. He introduced a new tax system which brought great benefit to Australia.

Senator Calvert —He showed some leadership; that is what he did.

Senator EGGLESTON —He showed leadership. That is what the ALP leader, Mr Beazley, certainly does not show. He moves backwards and forwards, flip-flops, in a very uncoordinated way. (Time expired)