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

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Leader of the Opposition moving immediately—That this House censures the Prime Minister and Treasurer for:

(1)

misleading the House and for refusing to come clean with the Australian people about how they are going to repay the Government’s massive debt; and

(2)

claiming that the 2009-10 Budget papers contain all data on economic growth, inflation rates, budget surpluses and financial assumptions through to 2022 that would support the Prime Minister’s dubious claim that his Government’s national debt will be paid off by that date.

We have an issue not just of financial integrity but of character. We have a Prime Minister and a Treasurer that have told this House that all the financial assumptions to justify their claim that $315 billion of debt will be paid off by 2022 are in the budget papers. They know they are not—they simply are not there. There are all those forecasts and estimates and projections through to 2012-13. The budget papers do not contain the financial and economic projections through to 2022. That is why, in good faith, we ask the Prime Minister to provide those assumptions: because he is saying to the Australian people that he is going to fling onto the shoulders of our children and their children debt unprecedented in our history—debt that has been incurred in large measure to enable the government to send out cheques to millions of Australians. This is debt that has been incurred while revenues were falling to enable the government to engage in cash splashes. Australians right around the country are saying to themselves, ‘What is the government doing, putting us further and further into debt and with so little to show for it?’

This matter of debt is a matter of vital public interest. For years, the coalition in government laboured hard to pay off the debt that the Australian Labor Party left us with—$96 billion. It took us a decade to pay that off, so naturally we are entitled to ask: how long will it take to pay off $315 billion of gross debt—$203 billion, they assert, in net debt?

Any claim that a government makes to be able to deliver a financial result has to be backed up by some evidence and assumptions. What are their assumptions about revenues, about economic growth, about inflation and about employment? All of these factors are perfectly relevant and perfectly necessary to enable the Australian people to form a view as to whether this debt—this so-called temporary debt—will be the work of 13 years to pay off or the work of 33 years or more to pay off. How can we trust the government? If the government is not prepared to provide the assumptions, how can anyone believe its claims that it will pay this debt off by 2022?

We would assume that the government has all those assumptions at their fingertips. We would assume that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer would not make this claim and would not give this reassurance to the Australian people without having all of that financial information at their fingertips. So it is perfectly reasonable for the opposition to ask the government—not once but three times—to provide that information here in question time. And what were we told? ‘Oh, it’s all in the budget papers.’ Those were the Treasurer’s own words. He said, ‘All of those are in the budget papers.’ But they are not in the budget papers. We asked him to nominate the page and he just gave us a few minutes of abusing the opposition. This is not good enough.

This Prime Minister and this Treasurer have deliberately misled the House. They have stated that vital and relevant financial information necessary for any Australian to form a view about whether this debt can or will be repaid by 2022 is set out in the budget papers, but most plainly it is not. Either they made a reckless claim that had no basis in fact, in which case they should acknowledge that and apologise to this House, or they have made that claim based on financial assumptions and economic projections, in which case they should make those projections public. They are the ones who have claimed that $315 billion of debt will be paid off by 2022. They are the ones who have given an assurance that it will be paid off in 13 years. They are the ones who have sought to reassure Australians who are anxious about the heavy burden of debt that they can see being thrown onto the shoulders of their children. It is they who have made that claim, it is we who have asked them to provide the evidence for us and it is the government that has misled the House by saying that the evidence is to be found in the budget papers, where it is not.

This is not the first time we have seen the financial recklessness of this government. We need only go back to the extraordinarily reckless claims made by this government about the so-called National Broadband Network. It had a cost of $43 billion—so they claimed—and there was no business plan and no financial analysis. The Prime Minister said on The 7.30 Report that it was an outstanding commercial investment. Like a snake oil salesman he called out for mums and dads to invest in it. Where is the financial analysis for that? None is to be found. This is the problem with this government. They are given to recklessness in spending and recklessness in making claims about economic and financial matters vital to the future of our children.

We have seen confirmed today in the Senate estimates that the $43 billion proposed to be spend on the National Broadband Network will, apart from $2.4 billion of it, all have to be borrowed, and not a cent of it—not one cent—is included in that $315 billion debt figure. So the $315 billion does not include anything for broadband and it does not include anything for Ruddbank and yet the government claims that it will be paid off in 2022.

This is a fundamental question about the government’s integrity. If the Prime Minister and the Treasurer want the Australian people to believe them when they say that this debt can and will be repaid, all they have to do—and they can do it right now—is provide the figures on which they base their claim. Or is this like the reckless claim about broadband? The day after the Prime Minister said that it was commercially viable and mums and dads should invest in it, his Treasurer was asked, ‘How many people will subscribe?’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know that.’ He was then asked, ‘What will they be asked to pay?’ He did not know that either. In other words they knew nothing about it. They had plucked a figure out of the air and thrown it out there as a distraction. I fear that this is precisely what they have done with their claim about the repayment of debt.

The government can claim that it is borrowing money to invest in infrastructure, it can claim that it is investing money in schools, it can argue the case for its cash splashes and it can say that that is a fiscal stimulus. There will be arguments for and against the merit of those investments and payments. But the one thing we know for sure is that every dollar of debt is a fiscal drag. Every single dollar of debt we fling onto the shoulders of our children will make it harder for them to enjoy a lifestyle and a standard of living equal to or better than that which we have enjoyed, because every dollar of debt will have to be paid for. It will have to have interest paid and principal repaid and all of that will mean higher taxes and higher interest rates in the future.

That is why Australians are so anxious about this debt. That is why they are concerned that each and every Australian man, woman and child is being loaded up with $10,000 of debt—$10,000 of debt raised by a government that 18 months ago had no debt at all and had cash in the bank. That is the level of the recklessness. Yet when we ask the government for the basic financial facts on which they base their claim that the debt will be repaid they will not provide it, and then they mislead this House and the nation by claiming those figures are in the budget papers when they know full well they are not.

This Prime Minister and this Treasurer have not simply thrown an unsustainable level of debt on the shoulders of our children but insulted us. They have insulted our children and the children who will come after them, because they have said, ‘We are going to raise this debt and we have no idea how it will be repaid.’ More importantly, they do not care. They neither know nor care about the damage they are wreaking on this nation. (Time expired)

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