Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will start off where Senator Smith finished—that is, on the last words in your speech where you said that there is much to be concerned about. There is definitely much to be concerned about, but not much of it is what you raised in your speech. I think what we have to be concerned about is the political ideology of the extremists in the coalition government who would have you believe that everything will be okay if you simply let the market rip, that there is no role for government and that the market is the determining factor for anything that happens in the economy.

The problem with that is it belies the reality that we do not live in an economy. We live in a society and a society needs support. It needs mutual support, it needs government support and it needs business support. Society itself provides support to both government and business. So this is not about an argument, in my view, that if we simply have a free-market economy and if you allow all the free-market ideology to run amok, then suddenly there will be this magical transformation and everything will be okay. You only have to look back at the global financial crisis to understand that that is the situation—that governments play an important role in the economy. Yet, we have this coalition approach, which is called the Commission of Audit.

We have had a number of commissions of audit over the years. We had the Howard government's commission of audit. What were the outcomes of the Howard government's commission of audit? They used that commission of audit to slash expenditure in higher education, the area that everyone realises now we should be investing in for the future. Higher education got belted under the Howard government because they did not like some of the academics who may have argued different political points from the Howard government. There was a huge price to pay for those academics and the higher education industry because they dared to critique the Howard government.

We had the Howard government commission of audit, which laid the framework for what was described as 'the need to improve productivity'. Improvement of productivity from a conservative coalition is simply about ripping away at workers' wages and conditions—another outcome of the commission of audit. It also introduced Work Choices and introduced a system that denied workers the right to collectively bargain. Over the time of Work Choices, what did we have? We actually had a decline in productivity in this country, because you do not improve productivity by taking away workers' rights. You improve productivity by a sophisticated approach, one that deals with the issues of quality, logistics, research and development, management systems and work organisation—but not one that simply tries to crush workers' rights.

The latest commission of audit was the Costello report in 2012 for Queensland and, by any analysis, when you put a failed Treasurer—a former Treasurer, one of the worst treasurers this country ever had—