Howard gives Rudd a history lesson

John Howard says that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd diminishes himself with his attacks on the economic record of the Liberal Party in government.

“It is tempting for a political leader such as Rudd to highlight his party’s virtues and ignore those of other parties. Last Monday, however, the Prime Minister carried political mendacity to new heights,” Mr Howard writes in today’s Australian.

The former prime minister described Mr Rudd’s analysis of the post-1980 economic reform process in Australia as “partisan, inaccurate and lacked any semblance of objectivity”.

When he launched Paul Kelly’s book The March of Patriots on Monday, Mr Rudd said, “The Liberals’ failure to advance a framework for increasing national productivity is not a minor blemish on their economic record. It reflects a fundamental failure of long-term economic reform and casts legitimate doubt over the extent to which the Liberal Party can be regarded as partners with Labor in the great project of economic modernisation for Australia.”

Mr Howard said that Australia needed five major economic reforms as it entered the 1980s:
Ӣ Financial deregulation;
Ӣ Fundamental taxation reform;
Ӣ Dismantling of high tariff protection;
Ӣ Privatisation of government-owned commercial bodies; and
Ӣ A freer labour market.

He said the process started with the Fraser Government’s introduction of a tender system for the sale of Treasury notes and Treasury bonds. The Fraser Government also started “the politically difficult task of deregulating interest rates, by removing all interest-rate ceilings on bank deposits”.

Mr Howard writes that Hawke reversed Labor’s pre-1983 opposition to financial deregulation “and otherwise broadly implemented Campbell’s recommendations”.

“The float of the dollar was driven by Bob Hawke as prime minister and the then governor of the Reserve Bank, Bob Johnston. Treasury, at that time, opposed the float,” Mr Howard writes.

Mr Howard credited the Hawke Government with “largely dismantling Australia’s system of protective tariffs”.

“The Keating government privatised Qantas and commenced the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank. The Howard government privatised Telstra.

“In the early 1990s the Keating government introduced a limited form of enterprise bargaining,” Mr Howard says.

“The Liberal and National parties supported the reforms initiated by the Hawke and Keating governments.

“By contrast the Labor Party, in opposition, fought tooth and nail against the reform attempts of the Coalition. Kevin Rudd called the introduction of the GST a ‘day of fundamental injustice’.

“Having promoted the privatisation of Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank in government, Labor in opposition consistently opposed the privatisation of Telstra, which was not finally achieved until after the Coalition won control of the Senate following the 2004 election.

“Predictably, Labor opposed all of the Coalition’s industrial relations changes,” Mr Howard writes.

“No side of Australian politics has a monopoly of either virtue or merit. Each according to its own value system has attempted to improve the lot of Australians.

“In failing to acknowledge this last Monday, my successor diminished himself, and not the Liberal and National Parties.”