Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I have been hearing a lot of concern lately in cricketing circles about the future of spin bowling in Australia. Do we really have a quality spinner whom we can send on the Ashes tour? Is spinning a lost art in Australia? I wonder who it might be that spins better than anyone else. Frankly, I was rather surprised when the Australian team was named the other day and the craftiest and trickiest spinning talent was actually left on the bench. He is someone who can spin with the best of them. He can spin to the left, the left and the Left—perhaps the most extraordinary spinner we have ever seen. But he was left behind. That man, of course, is the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. In less than a fortnight since the budget was handed down, the Prime Minister—ably assisted by his spin twin, Treasurer Wayne Swan—has tossed up more leg breaks, googlies, doosras and flippers to the Australian public than even the great Shane Warne.

But it has been spin without substance. Perhaps the most stunning example of the spin was the extraordinarily stubborn refusal of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer to use the words ‘$58 billion’ or ‘$300 billion’ together in a sentence to describe the government’s deficit and debt. Of course they were back at it again today, where the Prime Minister could not bring himself to use the word ‘dollars’ after the confusion about whether in fact the maximum debt is $300 billion or whether it is $315 billion.

Now there might not be much guile in a lot of that spin, and it is perhaps not surprising that the journalists were considering the actions of the Treasurer, and, for that matter, the Prime Minister, as just silly games. It was silly games, but it was not silly games by the media or the public. They had a right to be told in the budget speech how much the deficit was going to be and how much the debt was going to build up to in subsequent years.

Is it any wonder that the disease spread to the member for Petrie? She had not heard these numbers used together, so she could rightfully plead ignorance. She did not know what the deficit figure was; she did not know what the debt figure was when she was rostered for her perhaps once-a-month turn to do a doorstop on arrival to Parliament House. I guess she is off the list now, like the member for Dawson and others, who dared not to use the carefully chosen lines for the spin of the day.

For a full 13 days, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer seemed to think that if they did not mouth the words ‘$300 billion debt’ or ‘$58 billion deficit’ then the light bulb would stay off above the head of every Australian. They thought they could go on and bore interviewers, without the mere mention of any real numbers that would actually mean something to the people of Australia. But this $315 billion debt is in fact a lot of money. When the public come to appreciate how much this debt really means to them and to their future, they will know it is an awful lot of money. It is a debt bombshell like our country has never seen. And, when the spin doctors finally realised that this message was in fact starting to grate on people, they could not stop using the word ‘billion’. They were at it all the time, time and time again. Then they accuse the coalition of talking down the economy when we make frequent reference to the fact that this incompetent and incapable government has, in just 18 months, turned around a government with a surplus, a government with money in the bank, to one that is now borrowing from people around the world and heading towards a debt of $315 billion.

With all of the political spin in the world, no-one can make that sort of money sound like nothing. A billion dollars is a lot of money; a billion means a lot. In fact, if you are going to pay back this $315 billion at the rate of $1 a second, it would take more than 10,000 years to recover the debt. Labor has mounted, in just 18 months, a debt that, if it is paid off at the rate of $1 a second, will take 10,000 years to repay. It is real money; it is the money that should be in the hands and the pockets of the men and women of Australia. Mum and dad and their children will have to go without because they will be paying off the spending of this government.

This government might be master spinners, but they are completely incompetent when it comes to economic management. The children of today will not be able to go to the cricket because they will be paying off the spinners’ debt. They will not be able to go to the school camp in the future because they will be paying off their share of this enormous debt. They will not be able to enjoy the things that they should have in life because we will be paying off the debt of this government. It is simply an inevitable fact that there will be less money available to spend on roads and rail infrastructure, on schools and hospitals, on youth allowance, on cataract surgery—there will be less money in the future to spend on all of the important things in our society because one of the biggest items in every federal budget every year will be paying off this government’s debt, paying it off year after year. The debt bombshell will be blowing up in every budget between now and, the government says, some time in 2022—but that assumes record budget surpluses. It is the kind of surplus Labor have never achieved in their history, and yet we are being asked to believe it will come in, year in year out, in the future.

I have a bit of news for the spin twins: the public is brighter than they may think. The public knows a bad deal when it sees it. People were happy to get a $900 cheque to pay off some of their personal credit card bills or to enjoy a day at the poker machines or wherever else they may have chosen to spend it. I pointed out during the MPI in budget week that the interest bill for this $900 cash splash, and everything else that Labor was proposing, amounted to $900 a year. In fact, now that it has been confessed that the debt figure is $315 billion, the interest will be about twice the $900 cheque that these people have got once, except the interest bill is going to have to be paid every year until the debt is finally repaid. So, for one $900 cheque, people get a $1,800 interest bill every year of their lives until this debt has been paid off.

It is all about spin. There was plenty of spin before the budget, but when it came to budget night the ball hardly turned at all. The reality was the government was unable to make the tough decisions that were necessary to rein in its expenditure. All that is left, after all of this spending, is the debt bombshell. The chief spinner has gone off at the drinks break, leaving $315 billion worth of debt—and that is no small number. And, just because the government can think of other countries that have a bigger debt, that does not make this debt acceptable. Have they forgotten that only 18 months ago we had no debt at all? The wonder down under economy did not have a debt, but the government has wound it up so that now we can compare ourselves with the great spenders of the world. The government seems to think that there is some great, intrinsic merit in spending more than others can spend.

But it is not spending that matters; it is what you pay for that counts. The reality is that they have started to wind back a couple of the budget measures. It was not long before the union bosses came on the scene and said: ‘Hey, we won’t have this new share ownership scheme. That’s not for us.’ Now the captain, the chief spinner, did not come out to tell the public they were backing down on this story; it was twelfth man who was sent out to break the news that in fact the government was going to bow immediately to the union mates. It only took a few hours for the union mates to get their message across, and their servants, the people in government, decided to back down on this measure.

The reality is that there are plenty of other people in just as much need. What about the students who are going to lose their Commonwealth accommodation scholarships because Labor has abolished them? What about students in their gap year who are not going to get access to the independent youth allowance that they had expected? And what about those people who will no longer have access to cataract surgery because the government has decided to cut the benefit? This is the kind of approach that this government has taken to expenditure—splashing money around but, when it comes to people in need, it is time to cut and cut.

This government, like all Labor governments, spends a lot of time and spin on all sorts of things that they are going to do, and after a while the public realises that they have not actually done anything. Then we get to the next stage of the spin. The Prime Minister, or in the case of Queensland Anna Bligh, the Premier, goes out in a hard hat. They are seen in a tunnel every day pretending that something is actually being done—that they are actually a government that is delivering something. The spinners are out wearing the hard hats. Usually, in cricket when the spinner is bowling it is the close-in fieldsmen who wear the hard hats. In this case, it is the spinner himself who is wearing the hat.

They run this kind of spin that the government is spending more than the coalition did on this, that or the other. But what is important is not how much you can spend but how much you are actually paying for. Any five-year-old can go out and spend money, and spend more than the five-year-old down the street. What we really need is an understanding of where the money is going to come from. In our first eight years, we had to pay for what Labor had spent the last time. So, when they criticise us for not having spent money on roads, it was because we were paying money for the roads that Labor had built during their time in government. They have not learnt any lessons from that. They are out spending again now but not paying for it. That is a debt for future governments to pick up. The real test is how much are they paying for, not how much they are spending. So, when they go to openings—the opening of the new assembly hall that has been dumped in the schoolyard—they should not say how much has been spent on the project; they should say how much debt is being left to the children of that school to pay back: about $15,000 for each of the children in return for the school building that they get. When they have the plaque at the official opening saying how much was spent, it should also say how much debt has been left behind as a result of this spending spree.

Labor makes much of the claim that it is spending on infrastructure. But the fact is that Labor will spend less on road and rail construction over the next six years than the coalition committed to spend over the next five. For all the talk of $22 billion in new infrastructure spending in the so-called nation building for the future package, only $1.7 billion will be spent this financial year when the stimulus is supposed to be occurring. Only $1.5 billion will be spent in 2009-10. To construct all the projects that are part-funded in that package, other levels of government or the private sector will have to stump up another $60 billion. Nowhere in the budget papers or in the national infrastructure priorities are there any cost-benefit analyses to demonstrate that the project chosen is in fact the right one.

The Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government comes into this place frequently demanding accountability and talking about auditors’ reports. Now he is in charge, he is asking us to believe that Infrastructure Australia has done some kind of cost-benefit analysis on these projects and these are the ones that are chosen. But he will not release the figures. He will not tell anybody about it. This has all got to be confidential. We are not being told what the numbers are and why these projects have been chosen. It sounds very smelly to me, like Labor’s infamous Better Regions program—closed before it was even open. The only projects being funded are those promised by Labor members of parliament and Labor candidates at the last election. No-one else need even bother applying. I am looking forward to the Auditor-General’s report on the Better Regions program. It is a scam beyond belief. It is funding projects that have been specifically rejected by the department on the basis of their being unworthy.

Despite all the spin, this is an infrastructure package that means it is basically business as usual. It is about what the previous government would have spent in good times or in bad. The reality is that Labor is all spin and no substance.

They are also very good at criticising opposition members for being involved in openings and similar occasions for projects that might be funded under this package. Do they remember the $1.2 billion Investing in Our Schools Program? Labor members all over the place now are turning up to open Investing in Our Schools projects even though they abolished the program. Even the Treasurer turned up in his electorate to open one of these projects. He put it in his newsletter and said it was a government initiative. It was a government initiative all right—they axed the program! The hypocrisy that has been associated with this government’s criticism of opposition members for doing their job in their electorates is mind boggling. I can produce hundreds of letters from Labor members backing projects that they voted against, and their criticism is typical of the spin that the government is mounting around its budget.

It is just like when the Prime Minister arrives and the machines have to start up to provide a television picture so there is a pretence that there is something happening, and then all the machines stop when he leaves. This is the kind of government we have. Once the television pictures are done, then the project is done as well and the tab will be picked up down the track. (Time expired)

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