Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is particularly interesting to follow the contribution by the member for Melbourne on the Future Fund Bill 2005 and to have a tour of his various hobbyhorses that he read through. I am sure part of it will appear in his book. Interesting though his points may be, in many cases they were without a whole lot of merit. I liked his comment that this legislation was an indulgence by the government. When is protecting yourself against future liability an indulgence? I would have thought that part of the problem with the previous Labor government was that they indulged themselves too much. They indulged themselves to the tune of $96 billion as they racked up debt. Indulgence in government is when you do not look at your fiscal responsibility in the way that you manage the budget and that you rack up debt to an extraordinary level.

The member for Melbourne also railed against middle-class welfare and highlighted some of the schemes that he personally took objection to. Is it Labor Party policy for him to be against, for example, mature age allowances and capital gains exemption for some of the older members in our community? I am sure that that would go down well with the more mature citizens in the seat of Melbourne if that were the case! He commented that this bill was a lesser priority issue. It is extraordinary that the man who is the shadow minister for infrastructure, privatisation and a whole range of other things is back in the old socialist mould of what he wants the government to do. He does not like a whole range of initiatives that we would see as being important. So be it.

I would have thought that the review today of the member for Melbourne was his own indulgence as he ran through his various hobbyhorses. Be that as it may, instead of putting money into a Future Fund to meet superannuation liabilities of the future, he suggested firstly that we should simply shore up existing super schemes. The problem is that that avoids the reason the fund is being set up separately. It is being set up so that it is not captive to the super scheme itself; it is there to protect against future liabilities—an important distinction. Secondly, I would have thought all members opposite would be ashamed at such a huge level of government debt that they left for us to reduce. We have reduced it by $90 billion. There is $6 billion to go. Paying the interest charges on this debt incurred a cost of at least $6 billion every year. It is extraordinary when you think of what that money could have gone into. I heard the member for Melbourne talking about various projects—education et cetera—that were important to him. I know $6 billion would go very nicely in assisting the education budget. It would go very nicely in assisting the various challenges that the generational shift he talked about coming down the pike and challenging us.

In talking about reducing government debt, he said that it was somehow morally wrong to sell off assets and then claim that you had reduced your debt. The problem is that the previous government sold off the Commonwealth Bank, sold off Qantas and sold off Australian Airlines. It just went to the bottom line in order to assist its continuing pork-barrelling rather than look at the structural problems of the economy created by having such a huge amount of unserviced debt. This side of the House thinks it is entirely appropriate to use asset sales to repay debt and to reduce government liability so that those funds can be put into more worthwhile activities. Of course, much of the repayment of the debt has also come from government surpluses, which we are very proud of on this side of the House. Look at the many years of very large government deficits and the $10 billion plus left by the Labor government. And they claimed in their last budget that they were in surplus.

The member for Melbourne made a very strange point about Telstra shares being put into the Future Fund. He thought that it was inappropriate that we should take Telstra shares and put them in a government fund, because we would have part ownership of Telstra without having the benefit of deciding whom we put on the board et cetera—like the former Labor government did when they put their old mates on the board of Telstra. Why would you do that?

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