Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak in the Australian parliament today as the member for Ryan. I want to grieve on behalf of the people of Ryan and the wider Australian community. Of deep concern to me, not only as a member of the opposition but also as a citizen of this country and as the father of a little 2½-year-old boy, is where our economy is going. I want to grieve about the direction of the Australian economy and I want to express some thoughts on behalf of the hundreds of Ryan constituents that have contacted me in the last couple of months, particularly over the last month following the Rudd Labor government’s February expenditure package of some $42 billion. I think there is great concern in the community about the direction and the mismanagement of the Australian economy and I want to express some thoughts about government policy and about some alternatives that would have been better for the economy if they had been delivered. They would have been more sustainable, more visionary and more effective in getting the outcome that the Rudd Labor government sought to obtain—and it has failed miserably in its endeavour to do so.

In the past three months alone, we have seen the Rudd Labor government spend a massive amount of taxpayers’ money. I think that this has largely been misdirected. It goes to the question of the judgment of those in the senior echelons of the Labor government. As we all know, the first package was delivered in December 2008 and consisted of some $10.4 billion of taxpayers’ money. The second package was delivered in February and consisted of some $42 billion of taxpayers’ money. This is serious money: this is some four per cent of GDP alone. In anyone’s language this is a massive amount of money.

I want to give some context to this amount of money because I think it helps tremendously to put things into perspective. When the Labor government took office in 2007, they inherited a massive budget surplus. They inherited a surplus of some $20 billion, which was a legacy of the financial prudence of the Howard government. As an indication of the seriousness of the issue of financial management, consider the fact that it took the Howard government nearly 10½ years to pay off the deficit that it had inherited, some $96 billion of debt left by the Keating Labor government—a debt which drained the budget of some $9 billion in interest payments annually. So that puts it all into context. If it took more than a decade for the coalition government under Prime Minister Howard to repay some $96 billion in debt left by the Keating Labor government, one can only imagine the length of time that it will take for future Australian governments to repay the future deficits that will accumulate and be a chain around the necks of the taxpayers of Australia, in particular the generation of Australian taxpayers to come.

The Leader of the Opposition and the opposition have said that, considering the current difficult financial times that we have, we do not contest the point of stimulating the Australian economy with taxpayers’ money. But I think we have to draw the line somewhere and realise that this is taxpayers’ money and we do not know what lies ahead.

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