Alex White (Labour)

There is one reason for a change of Government, and it is related to credibility. We have a deficit that is the most serious in our lifetimes. Historically, it ranks very high on the list of economic crises anywhere in the world. We have seen one of the biggest collapses of a country anywhere on record. However, people accept that there are two components to our deficit. There is a structural element to it and a cyclical element to it. I regard the structural element of our deficit as being the Fianna Fáil element. The reason there should be a change of Government is not so much that a new Government would not have to find €4 billion on 9 December, because we in the Labour Party accept that we have been brought to a situation where that is necessary. We regrettably accept that we must take €4 billion out of the economy this December, and more in the future.

However, I disagree with a point that was made by Senator Quinn and Senator Boyle. When we measure the success of a budget, it should not be about how painful that budget can be. That is a complete abrogation of our role and of the requirement that is on politicians. Are people suffering enough? I can assure Senator Boyle that people already know that this budget will be an unhappy event. It is ludicrous to suggest the measure of our sense of achievement will be in how unhappy people are after the budget and that there will be success if they are screaming, unhappy and annoyed. What a poverty of imagination that betrays on the part a politician to suggest that this should be the case. I accept that the budget will be painful, but that should not be a measure of its success.

We need a broader sense of bringing the community together with what needs to be done. That will require political leadership beyond accountancy economics, which is what we have now. We regrettably have to subscribe to that accountancy economics because we can see the reality of what is facing us in the next few weeks. However, we have a much broader vision that is lacking in this Government. The problem with Senator Boyle's point on a change of Government is that the people do not believe this Government has any credibility, especially the main Fianna Fáil component. They are simply not believed or trusted. All the former Taoiseach's talk this morning about growing bluebells is an example of how deluded both he and the members of his party are about how they are seen by the people. They are not regarded as people with any credibility because they have largely brought us to where we are. If there was no other reason for a change of Government, that is one. Nobody can get away from that reality.

The situation has been described by other colleagues and there is no point in my taking up the short time I have describing how bad things are because we know how bad they are. The serious situation facing us is perhaps best expressed by the unemployment situation. We are now looking at 40% unemployment among people aged 15 to 19 years and 30% among those aged 20 to 24 years. It is no good for the Minister to say the increase has slowed down. As we will see when the figures are released, the increase has slowed down in considerable measure because of the return of emigration, which it is clear and documented is beginning to happen.

The problem I have with the whole approach of the Government is not that it and its advisers in the public service are sitting down to come up with the measures they need in the next few weeks. It is that I cannot believe for one moment that it would be possible or desirable to take any more than €4 billion out of the economy. I respectfully cannot understand how Senator Quinn or anyone else could conceivably justify how the economy would even survive losing more than €4 billion on 9 December. Even the Government does not believe it could survive a bigger whack than €4 billion. The situation that more could be taken out is fanciful, not in the sense that one cannot actually do the sums and subtract €8 billion but because of the impact it will have on people's lives, on public services - the real, everyday services that people need - and on the overall future prospects of the economy. Such a deflationary act would be a seriously retrograde step.

My problem with the Government's approach is not so much that it will do the sums and the subtraction but that there is no vision for anything else. Where is the jobs strategy? Where is the strategy to face the future in terms of turning the economy around? The Minister of State in his speech listed three priorities for Government policy, first, the banking system, second, to ensure the public finances are stabilised, with which I absolutely agree, in case I am misunderstood, and, third, to regain our international competitiveness so as to be in a position to exploit the global economic recovery and to generate employment growth. However, what is the Government doing about any of these things? It is not enough for a sovereign government to say it will take action to position itself so it can take advantage of changes that happen in other countries and elsewhere. We should be agents of our own futures and take steps and have policies that will ensure we can restore confidence in the economy through job creation strategies including - this is where I would agree with many of the points made by Senator Quinn - genuinely targeted assistance to enterprise, small business and people with ideas and those who want to take risks. That should absolutely be part of our turning around what has happened, and it is the sort of thing I want to hear from the Government.

It is lamentable that Government policy is reduced to those three items. This is not because any of those items is wrong. I agree that each one of them is necessary. However, they are far from sufficient, which is the problem with Government policy. It is doing plenty of things that are necessary but it is not doing anything like enough of what is required to turn things around.

Senator MacSharry's contribution was interesting and thoughtful in regard to a number of issues, most strikingly in regard to taxation. If I understood him correctly, he thought there was a strong case to be made for a higher rate of tax for those earning in excess of, say, €100,000 or €150,000. In that, he is reflecting a view taken by Mr. Ray MacSharry, who is not unrelated to him. I agree with that view and my party has advanced that proposal, not, as we are often accused, because we take pleasure in taxing people, but because we have to face the fact that one of the legacies of the past ten years is that we have introduced some progressive new public services that we all support. I do not say the Government has not done good things, whether in regard to special needs assistants, improving infrastructure or the new child care system which is being introduced. All of these things are important and any society or country wants to have those kinds of services. However, what I lay particularly at the door of the Fianna Fáil Party in Government, as well as the vanished Progressive Democrats, is that they sought to persuade people that these services could be funded permanently from the kind of temporary taxes we saw being levied through the property bubble.

We cannot have world class public services without a taxation system to sustain them. The figures just do not add up. I am not in the camp referred to by Senator Boyle, namely, trying to persuade people that everything can be fine and we can have great public services without the answer to the question as to how we are going fund them. We did not make long-term provision in the last ten to 12 years for those public services and the advances that were being introduced. Now, we are left with a situation where we are asking ourselves whether we have to remove these services or whether we must consider, at least in part, what contribution a reform of the taxation system can bring, including an increase in some areas of taxation.

The figures show that we are one of the most under-taxed economies in the world, certainly in the OECD, which has been documented repeatedly. The Government was very happy to welcome the support of Dr. Garret FitzGerald for the NAMA project. I disagreed with Dr. FitzGerald on that but perhaps the Government will also agree with him on his comments in The Irish Times on 7 November last, which is a very clear statement of the position. He said: "[W]hat I find absolutely unacceptable is that because of what seems to be universal cowardice about the need to tackle our unsustainably low level of income taxation – in most cases at a level which no other developed country in the world would ever even contemplate – we are currently prepared to tolerate cuts in our health services that threaten the lives of our people, including in particular our children, as well as some cuts that will weaken our already grossly under-funded education system."

With regard to the trade unions, I respectfully disagree with what I understood my good colleague Senator Twomey to suggest earlier, namely, that there was a sense in which trade union leaders were acting in a perhaps somewhat less than responsible manner, or that they were psyching up their members, as it were, into thinking life could be otherwise than it is. I do not believe that is the case. I do not believe the trade union leaders are doing anything other than giving, as best they can, genuine leadership to their members. They are in an extremely difficult situation and I certainly do not believe the trade union leaders in this country are the problem. We can see the problem. It is not in the trade union leadership; it is much closer to home in this House.