Labor rewrites its recent history

HOOKED on instant gratification like kids to an Xbox, some of the sillier talking heads are demanding the ­Abbott government take responsibility for the mess Labor left (left in more ways than one) after six years in office. There's certainly no shortage of Christmas clowns in Canberra this month. From the Opposition benches to the Press Gallery, troupes of overpaid jesters are spouting lines that must have come straight from the Christmas cracker factory. Whether it is Opposition leader Bill Shorten, the usual gaggle of ABC geese or Channel 10s dyed-in-the-wool champion of the Left, Paul Bongiorno, it would seem that activities of the failed Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments are being airbrushed from the historical record with the same alacrity demonstrated by North Korea's skilled revisionists. To take the treatment of but two news examples that emerged last week, the collapse of Holden and the release of the real state of the NBN disaster, it would seem Labor and its cheer squad ­believe the Coalition was secretly running things even though it lost office in 2007. Holden was a shot duck, and was always going to be a shot duck, even before Labor introduced industry-punishing measures like former Prime Minister Julia Gillard's penalising $460 million carbon ­dioxide tax and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's brutal $1.8 billion fringe benefit tax hit to car-leasing companies. In just the last two years, the Labor government broke $1.4 billion in promised funding commitments as it vacillated on car industry policy. Forget the crocodile tears being shed by the assorted union bosses and recall that Gillard once promised $34 million for Ford, which she said would create 300 jobs. Within eight months 330 employees had lost their jobs and Ford subsequently announced its departure from Australia. Rather than blame Prime Minister Tony Abbott for Holden's demise, as Shorten ­attempted to do on the last day of the parliamentary year, he should have been reminded by the media that Gillard, whom he supported before he knifed her to bring back Rudd, whom he had earlier knifed, had boasted last March: "It gives me great pleasure to be able to say to the House that we have worked together with Holden and we have secured Holden to manufacture cars in Australia for the next decade." Labor MP Nick Champion, whose South Australian electorate of Wakefield is home to many Holden workers, sent out a letter before the last election in which he wrote: "I have secured guaranteed support for GM Holden, Elizabeth, ensuring production until 2022." But Champion is not the most egregious of Labor's galahs, he would be thrashed in any contest by former Treasurer and serial humbug Wayne Swan, for instance, or former Finance Minister Penny Wong, or that other former Treasurer Chris Bowen. Who could possibly forget the sight of three departmental heads branding Rudd, Bowen and Wong liars after they ­attempted to claim the public servants had rubbished the Opposition's policy costings? Another contender for class fool is former Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, now the shadow Communications spokesman, who shrieked about broken promises last week as the Abbott government started to get to grips with the massive catastrophe that is Labor's NBN. Now that the NBN's new chairman has looked at the books and discovered that Labor's dysfunctional plan for the broadband network would have cost a staggering $73 billion and missed Labor's deadline by at least three years, Clare says the plan to apply a bandage to this haemorrhage constitutes a breach of "one of the most important promises it (the Coalition) made before the election". Can this galoot really think the Abbott government should have pursued Labor's extravagant rollout, which the strategic review discovered would have needed $29 billion more than Labor's forecast $44 billion, had it continued because of expected cost blowouts and totally unachievable revenue targets? As Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull told the House Thursday: "The NBN has been shrouded in a web of spin, obfuscation and exaggeration. Forecasts have been set, missed, set again, missed again, set a third time, and missed a third time. Beguiling promises have been offered but not delivered." Releasing the report, he said: "Critically, this report is not reverse engineered to justify or rationalise government policy, whether set out in a speech, conjured up by press release or sketched on the back of a drink coaster. "I emphasise this point ­because the facts so methodically presented in the review make it plain that the NBN is in a worse state than Australians have been told."