“Of the $8.7 billion that was sent out in December, only $1 billion was spent and the effect of that was somewhere between contentious, dubious and non existent. The Reserve Bank today has left the obligatory door open that something may happen in the future, a mere peripheral courtesy to the Government,” he said. “The only things certain about the so-called stimulus packages are the debt we will have to pay back and the ramifications of a lack of excess liquidity in the domestic economy due to the upward pressure on interest rates in the long term as the Government competes for funds to service their fiasco.

“Once more fuel prices are going up, sucking any spare oxygen out of consumer spending and dampening confidence. This is something the history books will record as one of the issues that contributed to the financial crisis and was never dealt with in a decisive manner by the Labor Government.

“We keep, like a beaten dog, crawling back to our fuel master in the expectant belief that the treatment they will hand out this time will be different to the treatment they handed out last time. The Australian Labor Government has the abundant capacity to develop an alternate fuel policy through such things as second-generation biofuels but has done nothing.

“The Labor Government could have been investing in projects of national significance such as the 69 kilometres of rail that would link Moranbah to the Abbot Point coal facility in Bowen, Queensland, but has decided that the best thing to do for the nation is mothball the project. The Labor Party has decided that the future of our nation is to be found in ceiling insulation and boom gates.

“The Reserve Bank of Australia today has delivered a statement that is ‘wait and see’ because they don’t quite know what is going on and I think that is a perfect purview of Labor Party economic policy.”