Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I have watched over the last few weeks and months as the government has expended billions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds, has blithely turned a $20 billion surplus into a $20 billion deficit and has in the process recklessly run up a $200 billion debt for the people of Australia, I have been reminded of some lines from that musical Evita, about the wife of the Argentinean leader Peron:

When the money keeps rolling in you don’t ask how

Think of all the people guaranteed a good time now

               …            …            …

And the money kept rolling out in all directions.

It captures the government’s program: spend, spend, spend. And, if you do not have the money, we will borrow millions and billions of dollars in order to give it to you so you can go and spend it, and in turn the next generation of Australians can repay the debt and the interest on that debt.

What we have seen in this latest $42 billion package is turning a surplus of over $20 billion into a deficit of over $20 billion. And, on top of that, it is compounded by deficits running into the future and a burgeoning Commonwealth debt to which we can add the debts of each state in Australia—debts being run up by Labor parties in government in those states. This is the greatest debt at a government level that Australians of any generation will have to bear.

Mr Rudd says he is doing this in response to the global financial crisis. He would have some credibility if his past actions indeed led to an outcome which is understandable and believable. But last year the Treasurer, Mr Swan, and Mr Rudd were telling us that inflation was the major problem facing the Australian economy, and they were egging on the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates. We were subsequently to find out that the very time those interest rates were being run up was the very time when the economy indeed was changing.

So we have got this package, which is ostensibly about—we were told—creating jobs for Australians. In December we were told that $10.4 billion would create 75,000 jobs, $4.7 billion in another package would create 32,000 jobs and $15.1 billion in the COAG package would create 133,000 jobs. In the space of a few weeks the Commonwealth government was spending some $30 billion to create, we are told, somewhere in the order of a quarter of a million jobs, and yet the latest unemployment statistics—data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics—show that unemployment in Australia has risen. Not one job.

Yet, more recently, there was another $42 billion which we were told this time is to support—and we have avoided the word ‘create’ now—another 90,000 jobs. We are being told that this money, this $72 billion of taxpayers’ money—they will have to pay it eventually—is being used to create 330,000 Australian jobs. Yet, when asked, the government cannot point to one job that has been created. We know that the hard data from the ABS shows us that unemployment indeed has risen in Australia. That is the situation we are in.

There is a benchmark by which this government will be judged, and that will not be in the assertions that are being made in this debate on the other side of the chamber; it will be in the hard data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. As unemployment rises—which everybody, even the Reserve Bank and the Treasury, concedes it is regrettably going to do—by 300,000 or 400,000, when the unemployment rate goes to over seven per cent, then we can look back on the assertions of this government that it was going to create 330,000 jobs. It is total nonsense. Again, in the words of Evita, we will be left lamenting:

Where do we go from here?

This isn’t where we intended to be.

Sadly, that is the situation that this government is putting Australia into. It will be judged not by its assertions but by its performance, and if its performance is such that unemployment continues to grow in this country then that is what it should be judged by. (Time expired)

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