Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Taxes have gone up by $19.7 billion, after taxes had gone down by $214 billion under the previous government. Under 12 years of the coalition’s economic management, the Commonwealth budget net asset turnaround was $141 billion. We paid off $96 billion worth of debt and we passed over to the new government $45 billion in accumulated assets with probably another $20 billion on top of that from this year’s surplus.

Labor have inherited an economy in which they do not have to pay $8.6 billion a year in interest and redemption. That is $8.6 billion that surely they could provide to help support people receiving $273 a week—the single age pensioners, the people who are being sympathised with by ministers who say they could not live on an amount like that. Yet Labor will do nothing for the people who are living in this sort of poverty. They said through the election campaign, when they were in opposition, that they would protect the aged, but they have ignored pensioners in the budget, they have cut benefits to self-funded retirees and, of course, there is something like $75 billion or more already gone from superannuation funds. That is the kind of support that Labor are offering to those who are most disadvantaged in the community. They have been unable to provide any kind of effective response to help these people.

Where are Labor on all the big issues? It is spin, spinning and more spin. The Prime Minister was recently described as Australia’s ‘first federal premier’ because he is trying to behave like the state premiers. I think that is probably an apt description. He has been a champion of friendly failure. Labor were going to end the blame game. They have done that all right—the states and the federal government all agree that ‘we’ll do nothing and we just won’t blame anybody’. So the public just suffer, the pensioners do without and the people who need some support and help get nothing.

What about the people of the Murray-Darling Basin communities like Mildura and Deniliquin and also the Riverland, in South Australia? They are facing a major economic depression. The number of homes and properties for sale has doubled in the past 12 months as a direct result of the drought and, more particularly, the uncertainty about this government’s water buybacks and its lack of structural adjustment funding. One irrigation district has offered itself for sale—lock, stock and barrel—because it is in so much despair over the way in which this government is responding to its needs. The government has stopped the coalition’s plan to refurbish the Murray-Darling Basin, it has stolen 75 gigalitres of water for Melbourne and there is nothing to help the people of those communities to rebuild in these difficult economic circumstances. The reality is that Labor is failing the people of Australia. Our economy has turned down dramatically in just nine months, and Labor has absolutely no answers. Don’t make the pensioners suffer! As the Prime Minister trips off again overseas, he will spend on his grog bill on the trip more than what pensioners will get in a week. He has no answers for the people of Australia. (Time expired)

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