Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This package is about jobs and it is about debt. We know how much debt it will throw onto the shoulders of our children: $200 billion. With surpluses of $20 billion a year, which would be an outstanding surplus, it would take a decade to repay. We know the demographic challenges our country faces. We know we are an ageing population. We know there will be greater claims on government in the years ahead. And that is why when we were in government we paid off all of Labor’s debt. We took debt off the shoulders of our children and their children. We relieved them of the burden of debts and obligations we had incurred, and now we are succeeded by a government that are throwing unprecedented debt onto their shoulders.

And for what are they throwing that debt onto our children’s shoulders? Jobs, they say. They have promised, from this package and their $10 billion cash splash in December, 165,000 jobs—75,000 jobs from December and 90,000 jobs from the $42 billion package. There is no evidence that one job was created by the cash splash in December. The greatest minds in the Commonwealth Treasury came to the Senate committee and could not produce any evidence that one job was created, let alone 75,000. And now we have the promise of 90,000 jobs from $42 billion. As the Leader of the Nationals said last night, that is $460,000 a job. Is that great value for money? Is that the sort of value that we should be mortgaging our children’s future to achieve? Is that effective government spending?

The Prime Minister has thrown all of the conventional rules of economics and financial management out the window. The economic conservative has become unhinged from any principles of common sense or economic prudence. He stood here today and boasted proudly that, by spending four per cent of GDP, $42 billion, we will get an increase of GDP of half a per cent this year and between three-quarters of a per cent and one per cent next year, according to the Treasury. So, for four per cent of GDP, $42 billion, the taxpayers of Australia will get 1¼ to 1½ per cent of GDP. What a pathetic return. What a pathetic, incompetent return. ABN AMRO were right in saying that, far from delivering a bang for the taxpayers’ buck, the government have delivered nothing better than a dull thud.

I do not know what is more troubling: the extraordinary falsehoods that the Prime Minister has delivered us today and every day on this topic or the fact that he may just believe them to be true. Is he disingenuous or is he deluded? It is hard to say. He has claimed that the opposition has said that nothing should be done. Yet everybody in Australia, except for the Prime Minister, knows that the government proposed a spending package of $42 billion and we said it would be more prudent and more effective to have a differently constituted package of between $15 billion and $20 billion. He insults the intelligence of every Australian by saying that we are in favour of doing nothing. We are in favour of action, but we are in favour of effective action.

The reality is that as of today the Labor debt train has left the station for destination unknown, except for this: our children and their children will pay for all of it. The Prime Minister is plunging our nation into enormous and unprecedented debt. Billions of dollars of that debt will be incurred from measures that will have no enduring economic effect. It is widely accepted that the $10 billion cash splash in December had no impact on jobs. There is no evidence that it had any impact on jobs. The Prime Minister, who was no doubt trying to achieve some sort of collective retail therapy, has been delighted that, after spending $10 billion of our children’s money, retail sales increased in December by $700 million.

The spending package that the Prime Minister has secured passage of today is far bigger as a percentage of our GDP than those spending packages in comparable countries—notwithstanding that those comparable countries, such as the United States, European countries and Japan, have economic conditions far worse than our own. In other words, we with the strongest economy have a government that is so panicked it is spending more money than governments with weak and struggling economies.

Australians need to know that this panicked government has made another panicked move, just like it panicked when it undertook an unlimited bank deposit guarantee, the damage of which—

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