Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Appropriation (Nation Building and Jobs) Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the cognate bills that we are debating today in this rushed manner in this House. I follow a member who, I note, although she talked about doorknocking during the 2007 federal election, failed to show her face during a by-election in a state seat, which was interesting.

Today the Leader of the Opposition has taken a principled but right stand. Today he has taken a decision which will not be popular in the eyes of the electorate and in the published opinion polls, but it is the right thing to do for our country. In my maiden speech I made the point that I come here with a set of principles to stand for. I also made the point that, no matter how big the bullies were on the other side, we would not be bullied; we would look at packages like this and make decisions based on our principles. One of those principles is that we should not leave this country in worse condition for our children than we found it in.

This package—and the whole economic management of this government—will leave this country in a worse position than we found it in. It will do so by racking up so much debt that opportunities for our children in the future will be greatly reduced. It will leave them with a higher tax burden and it will damage their opportunities for a better life.

I do not say this lightly. The decision we have taken in the party room and the very courageous decision taken by our leader will not be popular in my electorate or the electorates of many of my colleagues in the short term. But I think that in the longer term people will respect the fact that we have stood up for them and that we have not been bullied into a populist stunt by the government, based on politics. That is what these bills before the House are all about.

What does this package purport to do? It does several things. It spends money in all sorts of places—other people’s money. Let us not forget that is what we are talking about here. We are talking about our constituents’ money, not ours. The package does some things which I support—for instance, school modernisation, or a new version of the Investing in Our Schools Program, a Howard government program cut by this government which I support being reinvigorated to a certain degree. I support our leader’s position in that respect.

On Monday I was lucky enough to present a flag to the Kangarilla Primary School. It is a small school in my electorate, with 75 students. They have been completely ignored by the state Labor government in South Australia. Their air-conditioning system is blowing hot air, which, let me tell you, in 42 degrees is not a very pleasant thing for year 2 and year 3 kids to go through. Rather than replace it, which is what is required at the Kangarilla Primary School, the state government bureaucrats insist that it needs to keep being fixed, even though the air-conditioning maintenance people say it should be replaced. So I support a program like the Investing in Our Schools Program, which allows schools to make decisions which best suit their school—not necessarily to build gymnasiums or grandiose buildings that the Prime Minister or one of his ministers can open but actually to invest in infrastructure in their schools which will work for them. Air-conditioning systems are a good example.

I do support that sort of productive spending. However, what I have a problem with and what we will stand against and vote against, both here and in the Senate, is more cash splashes in the form of one-off handouts. The last package, the package announced in October last year and delivered in December, did not work. Some of that money—the very small proportion which went to pensioners—was welcomed, but I suspect that more broadly through the community people were a bit perplexed about why there was all this money being handed to them by the government. Why has a surplus which was 12 years in the making been spent in five months, so that we are now $22 billion in debt? We are going further into debt next year, further the year after and even further the year after that—to the point where we will be at least $100 billion in debt, which is more than what we found when we came to government in 1996.

But what is really concerning is a small provision which was not in the speech yesterday, the announcement from the Prime Minister. Nowhere can it be found that the government wants to increase its credit card limit from $75 billion to $200 billion. It is like when most of us in this place and a lot of our constituents get the helpful letter from the bank saying, ‘You might have a $5,000 credit card maxed out, sir’—or madam—‘but we’ll let you have $15,000.’ That is what has happened. And the Rudd government has written back and said, ‘Please, can we?’ We will have $20 billion worth of debt in this country that our kids, my kids, will have to deal with, if we let this package go through.

What is happening here is that, rather than a thought-through strategy on how to handle this crisis, we have got a panic: ‘Chuck some money at it, get some cash out the door and let’s make it political. Let’s write an 8,000-word essay, an ideological rant, and try and box the other side into supporting our big spending plans.’ Well, it will not work. We will not be bullied, as I said in my maiden speech.

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