12

Nation Building

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves

Attributed to William Shakespeare

When I fronted the media after the London summit, I wanted above all to reinforce our collective message that we had exceeded public and market expectations. I was acutely conscious of what the London Declaration could mean for both global confidence and confidence back home in Australia. A global plan of action to deal with the crisis was the missing bookend to the national plan of action we had formulated and implemented over the six months since the Lehman Brothers collapse. The press conference went well, both with the Australian media and the international media.

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On returning to Australia, my first order of business was to launch a new policy focused on youth unemployment. This would become the Jobs and Training Compact.1 It had three pillars. The first was a compact with the nation’s youth. Every person under seventeen was required to be either in full-time school, training, higher education or full-time work. All Australians under twenty-five were guaranteed a place in a registered course to improve their qualifications during the downturn.2 This radical intervention was designed to ensure that we avoided a generation of young people dropping out altogether and becoming permanently unemployable.

The second pillar was a $300 million fund for retrenched workers so that they could have immediate access to the Newstart Allowance, including one of 10,000 training places we had established for job seekers to provide Certificate III and IV level qualifications. In the previous twelve months we had already enrolled 92,000 job seekers in these programs.3 Most critically for this group, we were also able to announce a deal we had struck with the four big banks, enabling those who were suffering temporary financial hardship to postpone mortgage repayments for up to twelve months, and possibly to extend the period of a mortgage and reduce the amount of repayments.4 The banks were also prepared to look at similar flexible arrangements on car loans. Our overriding intent was to give working people hit by unemployment as a result of the crisis a chance to come through with new and relevant skills while keeping their homes.

The third pillar of the compact involved local communities. Local community employment coordinators would be appointed to ensure that the work flowing from our local stimulus measures to regions bearing the brunt of the recession would be matched up to the greatest extent possible with those losing their jobs.5

This was a big announcement. The whole compact was designed to ensure that our national stimulus policies were directed towards those communities that most needed help. Of course, for the Jobs and Training Compact to work properly, I needed the full buy-in of the states and territories, so we convened a COAG meeting – the seventh in the eighteen months we’d been in government – in Hobart. Fortunately, the premiers and chief ministers were all up for it, and many of the apprenticeship and training programs we offered across the country were joint Commonwealth and state programs.6

COAG was also engaged in other areas of national reform that were not driven by the immediacy of the financial and economic crisis. One of those was the new National Framework for Protecting Australian Children 2009–2020,7 which, after more than a decade of indecision, was finally agreed at the Hobart COAG. We were all familiar with tragic stories of a parent removing children to other states, often when there was a history of abuse. Until the states agreed to reform their information sharing protocols in 1999, the records of perpetrators could simply become lost. For some strange reason, the Commonwealth, under our predecessors, had been unwilling to come to the party in sharing relevant information held by federal agencies, including Centrelink and Medicare. My own approach to domestic violence and child abuse was zero tolerance. While some Commonwealth agencies expressed legitimate concerns about privacy, for me this was a secondary consideration to the protection of the innocent. So, for the first time, the Commonwealth signed up to fully collaborative arrangements with the states to better protect women and children at risk.8 We were already in the process of developing Australia’s first national plan to reduce violence against women, to be released the following year. In April 2009, however, I would announce our first down payment on that plan with a $12.5 million package to fund a new 1800 telephone counselling and referral service which would be available for women to access 24/7.9

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In the business of nation building, the critical foundation stone laid by our government was the new National Broadband Network. Prior to the 2007 election, we had undertaken to build a fibre optic to the node (FTTN) system which would deliver up to 40 times faster than ‘current speeds’ to a minimum of ‘12 megabits per second’ at an overall cost of $4.7 billion.10 We had said we would do so in partnership with Telstra.11 This was necessary if we were going to use Telstra’s pre-existing copper cable network to cover the last link between the ‘node’ and the premises, whether that was a house, a business, a school, a hospital or any other establishment. Not long after the government was elected, we had appointed an expert panel, led by the secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, to negotiate with Telstra how this might be done.12 Of course, Telstra was not the only would-be participant in the process; it had been the subject of open tender to the marketplace. Initially Telstra were willing partici­pants, but after twelve months’ analysis the expert panel concluded that Telstra, believing they had the government over a barrel because of their ownership of the copper network, were intent on extracting a heavy price indeed from the government for access. The panel concluded that purchasing this from Telstra would not deliver the best value for money for the Australian taxpayer.13

Because broadband was such a signature infrastructure investment for the government, I participated in several extensive cabinet committee briefings from the expert panel on where they had got to with Telstra. I vividly remember the day when Ken stunned us all by saying that the best financial outcome for the government, and the best social and economic outcome for the country, would be for us to not proceed with an FTTN network, but instead build our own fibre optic to the premises network (FTTP) using fibre optic cable all the way. I remember saying to Ken in the meeting that, for a pro-market guy like myself, life had been full of surprises since coming into office. So far we had engaged in what must surely rate as one of the single largest Keynesian interventions in Australian economic history. And now he was recommending we establish a new state-owned enterprise to commence the country’s single largest infrastructure project ever.14 Ken smiled. I did too. Still, it took some time to convince me that this was the most rational way forward. But as Ken and the panel patiently deconstructed the numbers, it became clear that if we were going to have a financially sustainable and economically effective National Broadband Network, this was the only way to go.

Once that decision had been taken, at least in principle, we then spent even more time working through how it could be done economically, financially and politically. These were hard deliberations. Stephen Conroy, as the responsible minister, was in his element. He had been diligent in the preparatory work he had done with the panel and had the advantage of knowing the industry well. However, he drove his cabinet colleagues nuts by insisting on reading his submissions to us in full rather than simply summing them up like the rest of us. After all, we each had a copy! This is not to say Conroy was incapable of dealing with arguments on his feet. He was certainly more intellectually dexterous than the treasurer. But his excessive reliance on the written brief and formal presentations meant many of us were putting our faith in the recommendations of the expert panel rather than the minister himself. The project was breathtaking in its scope and ambition. It was planned as a $43 billion public corporation in which the government would own a 51 per cent share, the rest being open to either institutional investors, the general public or through Australian Infrastructure Bonds.15 It would connect 90 per cent of all Australians’ home, schools and workplaces with fibre optic cable, with speeds of up to 100 Mbps, and with a capacity for that to be augmented in the future.16 For the remaining 10 per cent of the country – the more remote parts – NBN would deploy next-generation wireless and satellite technologies to deliver broadband speeds of up to 12 Mbps, an improvement on no broadband at all as was then the case.17

The panel advised that once the corporation was up and running it would be an eight-year build.18 It would need to be accommodated by a reform in the regulatory framework covering the telecommunications industry to ensure the absolute separation of the infrastructure provider on the one hand and the retail service providers on the other. The government would under no circumstances engage in the lucrative retail side of operations. It was far better for there to be a dynamic, competitive environment with a large mix of service providers to whom the NBN would provide wholesale access.

I told the cabinet that I was prepared to support the proposal on one condition: that once the NBN was built and running as a profitable enterprise, we would then privatise it completely.19 I saw no need to tie up public investment capital forever in such a large asset. My concern was to get this critical piece of infrastructure built. Its function as a national provider of wholesale broadband services could be enshrined in legislation so as to prevent any future exploitation of the retail providers. That was simply a question of legislative design. But I was more interested in the long-term effective use of public borrowing, so that when we eventually sold the asset through a public float, future governments could use the proceeds to either pay down public debt, or invest in the next generation of infrastructure needs. And thus NBN Co was born.

The response to the NBN Co announcement was extraordinary. The public loved it. The industry was rapt. Telstra was stunned. The Liberal Party at last had a socialist bogeyman which would cause them to foam at the mouth for the next five years. And the Murdoch media declared war. There was a simple reason for this, although I was not faintly aware of it at the time given we had many things on our plate. It was only later that I discovered Murdoch had identified a lethal threat to the long-term commercial viability of the Foxtel cable network in Australia. With a high-speed, reliable, affordable fibre optic network, punters could then buy their movies from Netflix or other Foxtel competitors, probably getting a better service, a wider range of movies and at a cheaper price.

Of course, the Murdoch men would always publicly deny that their editorial opposition to NBN Co was driven by the personal, commercial interests of the proprietor, but the virulence of the Murdoch media’s attack on the NBN was ultimately deeply damaging for the government. The only way they could see to get rid of NBN Co was to get rid of the government that had brought it forth. They were not faintly interested in the national economic arguments for turbocharging Australian small and medium enterprises by linking them to new suppliers, new customers and new markets. Nor were they interested in the boom that would be delivered to the Australian IT sector and the flourishing of home-grown internet service providers with new market opportunities. Nor did they care what NBN Co could deliver by way of better education services, the transmission of digital medical records, the development of remote area medicine, or the enormous efficiency dividend it would provide to government service delivery more generally. No, these were all national interest considerations. Murdoch Inc didn’t give a damn about them.

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Another arm of nation building was to make proper provision for the nation’s defence, and to provide for a long-term pipeline for major projects for Australia’s defence industries. Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon had been working hard on a new Defence White Paper since the government’s election. White papers were important for defence-planning purposes because they sought to integrate the government’s best long-term analysis of the strategic threats to our national security with the type of military doctrine and force structure that the Australian Defence Force would require to meet those threats.

Of course, defence policy formed but one part of the country’s overall national security policy, which brought together both defence and non-defence elements to enhance the country’s long-term security. We faced a range of conventional and non-conventional threats that warranted an integrated approach from our foreign policy establish­ment, the defence forces, the intelligence services and our other security agencies, of which there were many. The complex nature of counter­terrorism, counter­intelligence and cyberwarfare placed a new imperative on a ‘joined up’ government response to these challenges. I’d been thinking about these questions ever since I worked in the policy planning bureau in the Department of Foreign Affairs twenty years before. Now I had an opportunity to do something about it.

We called the Defence White Paper Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030,20 and the National Security Committee of the cabinet worked on draft after draft. The document was clear about the continued centrality of the US alliance. After the debacle that was Iraq, and the mismanagement of the Afghanistan campaign from 2003 to 2005, it was important to reinforce the alliance not just for the wider Australian public and our friends and allies around the world, but for some of the comrades from the Labor Party as well. There would be no softness on the question of the alliance so long as I was prime minister of the country. Equally, however, I was determined there would be nothing in the white paper’s strategic guidance that would cause us to be drawn into Iraq-type conflicts in the future. One of the earlier drafts included a reference to future Middle East contingencies as one of the number of determinants of the future force structure of the ADF. I had it removed. By that I was not indicating that we would never support the Americans in the Middle East again. But if we did so, it would only be if Australia’s direct national security interests were at stake. And if that contingency did arise, and our forces were called upon to support the United States, they would be drawn from an ADF force structure which had been determined on the basis of Asia Pacific contingencies alone, including the Indo-Pacific maritime sphere, as well as the defence of the Australian continent itself.

Considerable controversy arose, however, over the white paper’s treatment of China. I was deeply mindful of China’s rising power. I knew from decades of study and observation the likely trajectory of its economic development program. I also knew that the strength of its economy would in the future also be reflected in the strength of its military. In my view, China had every right to develop its military capabilities consistent with its national strategic priorities. And China, unlike Japan, did not have a recent history of foreign territorial acquisition. Through most of its history, the Middle Kingdom had had enough to contend with on the home front in holding its own country together. Nonetheless, the power projection capabilities which the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, comprising China’s land, sea and air forces, was acquiring would inevitably challenge the balance of power in East Asia and the West Pacific. This in turn would create strategic tensions with the US, which had enjoyed a virtual monopoly over power projection capabilities in the region since the end of the Second World War. We agreed, internally, that the language of our Defence White Paper would need to reflect these new realities:

China will also be the strongest Asian military power, by a considerable margin. Its military modernisation will be increasingly characterised by the development of power projection capabilities. A major power of China’s stature can be expected to develop a globally significant military capability befitting its size. But the pace, scope and structure of China’s military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern if not carefully explained, and if China does not reach out to others to build confidence regarding its military plans. China has begun to do this in recent years, but needs to do more. If it does not, there is likely to be a question in the minds of regional states about the long-term strategic purpose of its force development plans, particularly as the modernisation appears potentially to be beyond the scope of what would be required for a conflict over Taiwan.21

The reaction around the region proved to be interesting. I dispatched the principal drafter of the white paper, Deputy Secretary Mike Pezzullo of the Department of Defence, to regional capitals before the document’s formal release to explain its underpinning logic. The Indonesians were perfectly relaxed about what we had to say, reflecting, I presume, the strong state of the relationship we were developing with them under SBY’s administration. The Japanese were concerned that such direct language could be contemplated in a public document about China’s future strategic direction. Pezzullo was greeted with even less warmth by the time he arrived in Beijing. The Chinese demanded that we remove all language concerning China’s rise altogether. That heightened our collective resolve not to. Significantly, the language on China would be softened in the Gillard government’s subsequent white paper in 2013.22 Turnbull would also attack the 2009 white paper for being too hardline on China. Presumably they knew much more about China than I did. So much for me being the ‘Manchurian candidate’.

On the force structure itself, the white paper set out the single largest expansion in Australia’s naval capabilities since the Second World War.23 Our view was that our changing regional circumstances demanded nothing less. We confirmed the acquisition of two helicopter carriers, or LHDs, despite some furious lobbying to the contrary. Our strategic rationale was that it would be essential for Australia for the quarter century ahead to be seen in the South West Pacific and in South-East Asia as a power capable of coming to the aid of regional states, particularly in times of acute natural disaster. We had been unable to assist in the immediate response to the Indonesian tsunami because we lacked such a capability. On top of this, climate change meant that the frequency and intensity of natural disasters such as cyclones would increase across the island states of the South West Pacific. If they could not look to Australia to provide support, they would inevitably look elsewhere. We also announced a doubling of the submarine fleet with the acquisition of twelve large ocean-going subs capable of anti-ship, anti-submarine and anti-strike missions.24 We decided also to order three air warfare destroyers which would be equipped with new maritime-based land attack cruise missiles. New naval combat helicopters would be equipped with anti-submarine warfare capabilities. The air force was to be equipped with a hundred joint strike fighters, which would carry a potent air combat capability through to 2030. We would also acquire new Wedgetail early warning control aircraft, which would provide Australia with the most sophisticated capability we’d ever had to coordinate air combat and naval operations over vast distances. We would add over a thousand new armoured combat vehicles in support of land operations. There would also be a large-scale enhancement of our cyberwarfare capabilities through the establishment of a new cybersecurity operations centre.25

This new force structure was to be funded by an agreed set of savings across a generally wasteful portfolio with a history of poor acquisitions management. But this would not be sufficient to cover such a significant expansion in our capabilities. Overall we would need to maintain 3 per cent annual real growth in the defence budget through to 2017–18 and a post-2018 growth profile of 2.2 per cent.26 Broadly, this could be achieved by ensuring that defence outlays were sustained at about 2 per cent of GDP. The fact that subsequent governments elected to allow outlays to slip below 2 per cent of GDP would create implementation problems for the future.27 This should not have been the case. Given there has been no real departure from the force structure we sought to build in the years since 2009, it has been foolish indeed to allow the funding profile for major defence projects to drift further and further into the ‘out years’ of the budget cycle. In a volatile region such as ours, that is a complacency we can ill afford.

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After the NBN and defence, the third component of our nation building strategy was to begin the national infrastructure revolution we had promised while in Opposition. By this stage we had established and staffed Infrastructure Australia under legislation,28 and it had been ably led by Rod Eddington for the better part of twelve months. In the lead-up to the 2009 budget, it had been assessing project proposals from across the country, applying a consistent, rigorous methodology of financial and economic cost-benefit analysis for each potential investment. We had also legislated for the three infrastructure funds we had promised – the Building Australia Fund (BAF),29 the Education Investment Fund (EIF)30 and the Health and Hospitals Fund (HHF)31 – and agreed through COAG on a nationally unified regulatory approach to public–private partnerships, or PPPs,32 to enable us to co-invest with private capital in major infrastructure projects of the future.

The government’s infrastructure strategy was divided into short-, medium- and long-term builds. The centrepiece of short-term build, of course, was the $14.7 billion school modernisation program and the $5.6 billion social housing program.33 Together representing some 2 per cent of GDP, these were significant components of the overall strategy. The school modernisation program had been very much my idea, born of my experience as a local member in Brisbane. After ten years in parliament, I knew every school in my electorate – all sixty-four of them – like the back of my hand. I’d attended speech nights, given out awards and helped fundraise for school fetes in practically all of them. But I also knew that practically none of the state primary schools, not to mention the Catholic parochial schools, had decent library facilities. Most were located in converted classrooms, a number of which were not even air-conditioned, despite the stifling Queensland summers. In addition, virtually none of these schools had assembly halls. This meant that when it was sopping wet or boiling hot there was no place for the kids to meet as a single school community. This was a problem if you were trying to encourage kids to participate in public performances, debating competitions or even indoor sport. And having checked with many of my parliamentary colleagues from right around the country, it seemed that most local communities were in a similar situation. The vision I had in my mind’s eye was to turn each school into an oasis of learning, a seriously cool place to be, with a twenty-first-century library at its hub. I wanted kids to think it was great to go to the library before and after school, and during the lunchbreak, to explore the wonderful world of books, educational electronic games and the digital world. The school modernisation program was designed to dovetail with our computers in schools program for secondary schools, which was steadily coming on stream. And from a stimulus perspective, each one of these thousands of projects would create hundreds of jobs throughout 2009 and 2010, and do so in a way that turned every school into a construction site. I feel nothing but good about what we delivered for the next generation of Australian school students. It was the single biggest capital investment program in Australian schools in our history.34

As for medium-term stimulus, the package that Albo had released with the Australian Local Government Association the previous December would complement the school modernisation and social housing programs, taking the construction timeline out as far as 2011–12. One thing we admired about local government was their ability to get things done quickly. There were an infinite number of needs across their local road systems and we could add to these projects over time through the Australian Council of Local Government consultation mechanism, depending on how long the global crisis and recession would last. Albo had done particularly well with ACLG. Suddenly the Australian Labor government was the best friend local government had ever had. This continued to drive the National Party nuts. As a son of the Queensland country, this delighted my soul. I’d seen so many occasions where the National Party, routinely sitting on massive majorities in safe rural seats, didn’t really give a damn about delivering to their local constituents when push came to shove. We would see this attitude on full display when the National Party capitulated to the Liberal Party on the question of the National Broadband Network. The NBN would be a boon for regional and rural Australia, breaking down the digital divide between country and city. But because the Liberal Party was more interested in their political relationship with Murdoch, both the National Party and rural and regional Australia – which they claimed to represent – were seen as little more than collateral damage to Murdoch’s commercial interests.

As for long-term infrastructure, of course the centrepiece was the National Broadband Network itself. With a construction timetable of eight years, this meant on average more than $5 billion being invested right across the country annually, representing some 0.5 per cent of GDP.35 The Treasury calculated that at its peak in the construction cycle, NBN Co would be employing some 37,000 people each year.36 This was quite apart from the jobs generated by the businesses that grew out of the NBN. But the NBN wasn’t the sum total of our investment in long-term infrastructure. NBN Co had been announced just prior to the budget of May 2009. We decided that we’d turn the budget itself into a ‘nation building’ budget and include a number of other large-scale infrastructure projects which had been through the Infrastructure Australia assessment process over the preceding twelve months. This would become our $22 billion Nation Building Plan for the future, drawn from funds already saved in the three infrastructure funds set up at the previous budget, and investing in transport, energy, communications, education and health.37 The sum of $8.5 billion would go to projects including the Regional Rail Express in Victoria ($3.2 billion), the Hunter Expressway ($1.45 billion), the Ipswich Motorway ($884 million), the Kempsey Bypass ($618 million), the Redcliffe Rail Link (eventually $743 million), the Gold Coast Light Rail System ($365 million), the Northbridge Rail Hub in Perth ($236 million), the Bruce Highway Cooroy to Curra duplication ($488 million) and the Port of Darwin expansion ($50 million).38 More than half the total amount would go to metropolitan rail networks to reduce congestion and lower greenhouse gas emissions. It would be the first time ever that the Commonwealth government would invest in metropolitan rail.

We would also fund hospital, higher education, and medical research building programs across the country, some of which included the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse in Sydney, the replacement of the rehabilitation unit at Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth, the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, the new Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre at the University of Melbourne, the Translational Research Institute at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, and the Eccles Institute of Neuroscience at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at ANU in Canberra, as well as a network of twenty-two regional cancer care centres across the country to help non-metro residents with early and effective cancer treatment.39

As for future energy infrastructure, the government funded a $4.5 billion clean energy initiative, which contained a $2 billion carbon capture and storage flagship program, $1.5 billion for a solar flagship program, $465 million for Renewables Australia, as well as $100 million for the Australian Solar Institute.40 These were major initiatives designed to complement the 20 per cent renewable energy target and to help create the critical mass required for an Australian renewable energy industry, so that when the carbon price kicked in under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme from 2011, there would be a range of energy alternatives for corporations and individuals to choose from. It would also deliver to us the necessary international credibility we would need by the time we reached Copenhagen at the end of the year. We would also become major investors in our national water security infrastructure, including the Adelaide Desalination Plant and a massive water recycling facility for South-East Queensland, all part of ‘drought-proofing’ our major population centres.

With this budget, our major policy settings for dealing with the global crisis and recession were now in place. There was ultimately a limit to what we could do. The other half of the budget strategy was to chart a course back to surplus over time. The problem for us was that while we could forecast the fiscal and likely economic impact of the expenditure decisions we had taken for Australia, we could not predict with parallel certainty the trajectory for the global economy – that is, when the world would return to positive growth, how even the recovery would be across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and how sustainable. Treasury projected that the net effect of the measures introduced under the 2009–10 budget would increase GDP by 0.75 per cent above what it would otherwise be.41 It also projected we would add a further 2.25 per cent to growth in 2010–11.42

We would begin the task of budget repair with savings on the expendi­ture side. These would be built into the budget bottom line and become major elements of fiscal recovery. They were permanent savings, unlike the temporary expenditures we had added through stimulus measures. So despite it being an expansionary budget, the 2009–10 budget was also designed with $22 billion in savings across the forward estimates, so that by the 2012–13 financial year,43 all new spending would be offset by savings. Furthermore, as tax revenues recovered, these would also be dedicated to bringing the budget back to balance, as would a hard and fast discipline to contain real expenditure growth thereafter to 2 per cent per annum until the surplus was restored.44 The measures we put in place in the 2009–10 budget were, under the circumstances, a robust framework for bringing the budget back to balance over time.

Our budget deficit was projected to peak at 4.9 per cent of GDP in 2009–10 at the absolute height of the crisis.45 This would still be at the lowest end of budget deficits of all the advanced economies. As for net public debt to GDP, we projected this to peak at around 13.8 per cent of GDP in 2013–14 before falling.46 At the same time, the IMF estimated that by 2014, Japan’s net public debt would be more than 110 per cent of GDP,47 and those of the UK, the US, Germany and France would be in excess of 80 per cent of GDP.48 Despite the fear campaign that would be run on debt and deficit in the years to come, the proof lay in the pudding. As a result of our management of the crisis, Australia never lost its AAA credit rating from any of the international ratings agencies.49 That’s because the agencies understood the dilemma all governments had in the face of the global recession. They were also concerned to see whether the governments were serious about the path back to balance – something we were able to demonstrate in advance through the rigorous approach we had taken to expenditure savings in our two budgets thus far.

But fear, driven by the deliberate distortion of Australia’s budget deficit and net public debt, would always be a powerful political hammer for our opponents to wield. Of course, had the conservatives been in government in this period, they would have had to explain the rising debt and deficit occurring on their watch because of the calamitous collapse of public revenues during this period. And they would have had to take responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of people who found themselves unemployed and the tens of thousands of small businesses that collapsed in a recession we didn’t need to have. But because they weren’t in government during this period, and because there is limited intellectual honesty allowed in the Australian public debate on such basic financial and economic policy questions, our conservative opponents would never be held politically accountable for the completely opportunistic approach they adopted to the policy settings we put in place in order to weather the global financial and economic storm of the time. But such is the nature of politics. Assuming, of course, you accept that lying about the real state of the economy is perfectly legitimate for the conservative parties, even in the midst of a global financial and economic crisis. The bottom line is had Turnbull been prime minister during the crisis, Australia would have gone into recession because he opposed our second stimulus strategy. Australia would also have had a budget deficit because of the collapse on revenues. And Australia’s public debt would have increased significantly as a result. But the conservatives somehow bask in the continuing public myth that none of this would have happened.