Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Last night I heard a member of the Labor Party describe this budget as a traditional Labor budget. I thought how true that is—big deficit, big debt and more people unemployed. This is the Labor way. It is like groundhog day in this place. The Labor Party comes in and Australia heads towards recession. The Labor Party comes in and we reach record levels of deficit and debt. The Labor Party comes in and spins fiscal responsibility, and yet they have become the biggest-spending government in modern Australian history. There is a lesson here: you always have to look at what Labor does and not at what they say. For months now, the Labor Party has been telling us that the decimation of the budget, the massive debt that is being accrued as a result of significant deficits, is all caused by the collapse in revenue. And yet, when you have a good look at the budget papers, you can identify this: finally the truth emerges during the lock-up that the Labor Party, through its unbelievable expenditure since the Rudd government was elected, has become the biggest-spending government since World War II. Of the $188 billion of net debt, two-thirds of that is directly linked to new spending initiatives by the Rudd government.

They are not just new spending initiatives but reckless spending initiatives. They are reckless spending initiatives that not only blow the proceeds of the last mining boom but seek to spend all the proceeds of the next mining boom. This is reckless fiscal management. It is an assault on the public finances of Australia that we have not seen in generations. They have done it wilfully and they have done it without any care for the future. On each day that they come into this place and lecture us—the Liberals and the Nationals—about fiscal responsibility I want everyone to remember that in 1996, when the coalition were last elected into government, we inherited a debt of $96 billion. We inherited a $10 billion black hole. We were left with nothing in the cabin. We had to make hard decisions to repair Labor’s mismanagement—they were damn hard decisions. I was elected in 1996. There was hardly a government service left in my electorate in North Sydney after that budget. It was a budget that had to be done by the former Treasurer up there, the member for Higgins, who had to make the hard decisions.

Let us remind Australians for the record that the Labor Party opposed us on every single decision, root and branch, that would get the budget back into surplus and that would pay off Labor’s $96 billion debt. The more I hear these sanctimonious fools lecturing us about responsible opposition the more I reflect on the fact that when they left us with $96 billion of debt, when they left us with a black hole of $10 billion, they voted against all the tough initiatives, such as the reform of higher education, a tough initiative; the PBS reform, a damn hard initiative; changes to the disability pension; and HECS increases. They voted against privatisation not once but on a number of occasions over the whole 11 years. They voted against the super surcharge levy, and then they voted to try and keep it some years later. They voted against the closing down of Working Nation, where they fiddled the figures about the real impact of the Keating budget.

And then it came to structural reform, the stuff that lays the foundations, the important stuff, the important initiatives that actually make a difference to the fabric of the nation—tax reform. How hard was that? I remember sitting in this House day after day, arguing with the then shadow Treasurer, Simon Crean, as they were tearing apart the hardest structural initiative in modern times. It was major tax reform, and they voted against it. Even though we won an election with a mandate they voted against it. Even though every election we sought a mandate and even though we won a mandate on privatisation they voted against it. Even today how ironic it was to see the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy coming to the dispatch box and saying: ‘We have fixed the R&D tax concessions. The coalition reduced it from 150 per cent to 125 per cent but—good news, Australia—it’s back at 150 per cent.’ Do you know why we reduced it? Because we ran out of money. Do you know why we ran out of money? Because of Labor.

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