Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

While the opposition may be taking the politically unpopular course with the Appropriation (Nation Building and Jobs) Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and cognate bills by not immediately acquiescing to the government’s demand that we pass them without proper scrutiny—which is what they are demanding—we are prepared to take the courageous line because at least one political party in this country has to act responsibly. At least one political party in this country has to do what is right, not what is easy and politically popular. Those who are on the government benches are yet, since the election in November 2007, to make a difficult decision. They are following the advice of their senators from New South Wales who advise them to be prepared to go into deficit, and deeply, if it would help them to win the next federal election. They are doing that. They are being profligate with taxpayers’ money. They are making the easy decisions to spend, spend, spend. But the opposition, led by Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, are prepared to stand up for what is right, and in the end, in the long term, the Australian public will see this debate for what it is: one side of the House being prepared to take out the taxpayers’ credit card and run it up to the absolute limit, and the other side of the House being prepared to stand up for what is right, to stand up for proper scrutiny and to stand up for no debt and low deficits or surpluses.

Those on this side of the House believe in fiscal rectitude. Those on the other side of the House believe in spending in order to buy their way out of difficulties—in the same way they have done since time immemorial. Labor’s way has always been to tax and spend. There is not a spending idea that most members of the Labor Party do not think is a worthy spending idea—because they are not spending their own money; they are spending taxpayers’ money. The pattern has been the same since the Whitlam government in 1972, and this government are the sons of Gough, the sons of Jim Cairns and even—in one case, literally—the sons of Frank Crean. There is a Crean in the Rudd government, and unfortunately he is allowing the government to pursue the same policies that his father, Frank, allowed his party to pursue in the Whitlam government. They are sons of Cairns, sons of Crean and sons of Gough.

To those Australians who look at this package and see an advantage for themselves today and wish that the opposition would immediately support the package, I say: consider the long-term consequences. This package will put the Australian budget into tens of billions of dollars of debt overnight. Within four years, the country’s debt will be $70 billion, and that is the conservative estimate. In the longer term, our debt will be beyond the wildest nightmares of those of us who were dismayed by the Hawke-Keating government’s $96 billion debt when we took over in 1996. We had to fix up the mess that had been left to us by the Hawke-Keating governments. And isn’t it always the way! Labor spends and the Liberals and Nationals have to fix the mess. And it will happen again. It happened after 1929-32, when we had to fix the mess created by the Depression and exacerbated by the Scullin government. It happened again after 1972-75, a period when the oil shock crisis brought unprecedented economic conditions to Australia. That situation was exacerbated again by the Whitlam-Cairns-Crean government, and we had to fix the crisis. It happened again in 1996 and it will happen again in 2010. In the longer term, the Australian public will look at this package and think, ‘Thank God that one side of the House showed some responsibility while the other side of the House, the Labor Party, were prepared to spend into debt and deficit!’

This debt will dwarf the Kim Beazley black hole of $10 billion that we inherited in 1996. We are talking about a debt that will lead to higher taxes and reduced opportunities for our children—and not only for our children but for our grandchildren. As the father of four children all under nine years of age, I am not prepared to saddle them with such an enormous debt into the future. Other members of the House, those on the Labor side of the House, seem prepared to do so. I know that many members of the government have young children. They have obviously decided that saddling them with the debt gets them out of a fix and will help them win—they hope—in 2010. They have decided that their children and grandchildren can wear the consequences of the decision they are making today, just as long as they win and get their backsides back on the government side of the House in 2010. That is all that has ever mattered to the Labor Party. That was the advice of Mark Arbib, from New South Wales, when he went to see Rudd and Swan and told them, ‘We must spend into deficit if we want to win.’ That is the New South Wales way. That is why New South Wales is now a national disgrace economically, and it is why their government is almost as bad as Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela.

The fine detail of these bills, which never made it into the Prime Minister’s set piece speech for the media and the spinmeisters—a speech for which he had obviously spent weeks preparing and to which he gave the Leader of the Opposition an hour and a half to prepare a detailed response—is that the government is raising the legislated limit on the government credit card from $75 billion to $200 billion. The government is essentially asking the parliament to give it a $200 billion blank cheque. But my greatest concern is in my own portfolio area of education, where the government has announced a package of $14.7 billion of spending. This will be welcomed by the schools sector. Who would not welcome it? Schools will be delighted that this money may be spent in their schools and institutions. But I say that it ‘may be spent’. They may have the estimates correct on how much this is going to cost, but we cannot, on this side of the House, give a big tick to this package, no matter how seemingly generous, given the track record of the Minister for Education in delivering the policies that were announced before the last election.

In two key areas—trade training centres and computers in schools—the minister has hopelessly failed to deliver on the promises that were made by the now Prime Minister before the last election. The part-time Minister for Education, with her eye on the ball of industrial relations rather than education, has been manifestly unsuccessful in delivering the Trade Training Centres in Schools and computers in schools programs, and everybody in the sector knows it. While many are too intimidated to say so because the government is, of course, the biggest spender on education in Australia, the truth is they all know it. Computers in schools has been a manifest failure. It is in free fall. It is costing twice as much and delivering half as much as was promised. There was supposed to be one trade training centre for every one of the 2,650 secondary schools in this country. How many have been delivered?

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