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

I note that the Treasurer has again refused to debate me on a budget matter. It should not come as a surprise that he has sent the howdy-doody doll, the pretend Paul Keating, out to do his bidding yet again. Yet again the Treasurer has turned away the opportunity to debate me about issues relating to the nation’s finances or the nation’s economy. That should not be a surprise because we have a Treasurer that is more interested in spin than substance given the various different prebudget spins that he used. At first only a few weeks ago, on 19 March, he said it was ‘pie in the sky’ to contemplate surpluses earlier than those that had been previously forecast. He said that to Kerry O’Brien. When I actually wrote an op-ed in the Australian Financial Review outlining how the government could in fact bring the budget back to surplus earlier, not only was that ridiculed but in fact the Treasurer was so unimpressed with that contribution that he tried to do it last night in the budget. He has failed the test, and the test is reality. This government has a tendency to make promises that it cannot deliver. He has a tendency to create expectations that cannot be met. Consider the rather undignified way in which the Treasurer stood up in the chamber today and urged us to come clean on when we would deliver a surplus, when in fact as Treasurer he has never delivered a surplus and as Treasurer he never will deliver a surplus. Yet he is calling on us to give him the path, to set the route, to delivering a surplus some time into the future.

Labor will never deliver a surplus under Kevin Rudd. Labor will not do so because even after last year’s budget with a $54 billion deficit, which was the biggest spending budget in a generation, and even after last year’s budget where the government predicted the end of the world as we know it—so even under the terms of those budget parameters—in this budget the government has increased spending by $26 billion. If you thought they were throwing in the steak knives, wait because there is more. There is a 2010-11 budget that will spend an extra $26 billion. In fact, the 2010-11 budget forecasts a massive $40.8 billion deficit. It took 25 minutes for the Treasurer to get the words out last night of a deficit of $40.8 billion. Do you know why? Because the fact of the matter is that, when they actually deliver a surplus according to their own forecasts, by that stage this government would have borrowed over $700 million a week to fund their deficit. That is $100 million per day, every day, to fund their deficit. Then the hard task of repaying the $93 billion starts. What is it with Labor and $90 billion debts? Anna Bligh now has apparently something like $90 billion of debt in Queensland. Paul Keating left $96 billion of debt. If a change of government does come at the next election, how much is the Labor Party debt going to be? Around $90 billion. It is something that is fixed in the DNA of the Labor Party: leave the debt and get the coalition to do the hard yards of paying off the debt. That is because the Labor Party loves to spend money.

Of the entire budget numbers, of all the budget parameters, of all the budget estimates, there is only one number you can rely on Labor to deliver, and that is how much they are going to spend. But it goes even further. That is not even an accurate figure from time to time, because in 12 months under this government we have had blow-outs on the NBS. We have had a $1 billion-plus blow-out on the PBS. We are now spending $1 billion to fix up their failed border protection policy. We are now spending $1 billion to fix up their pink batt program—what a disaster that was, costing four lives. Now we are spending $500 million on a new health bureaucracy. What upsets me most about that spending program is that only a few weeks ago Kevin Rudd solemnly promised the Australian people that there would be no new health bureaucracy associated with his hospitals plan. That is what he promised. Well, he misled the Australian people—$500 million on a new health bureaucracy.

This is the Prime Minister who said that the greatest moral, social and economic challenge of our time was dealing right now with climate change. Of course, what happens? He dumps the ETS. Again, we remain a little confused, as Australians would be, with last night’s budget. The Treasurer spent a lot of time talking about the emissions trading scheme and dealing with climate change, but it was not in the budget numbers. Let us get this right: last year, the government had the ETS in the budget numbers but they failed to deliver it. This year, they have not got it in the budget numbers but they say they are going to deliver it. This is everything about Labor. Do you know why they took it out of their budget numbers? Because it would have added a full one per cent of GDP to their expenditure and about the same, one per cent of GDP, to their revenue, which would have made them by far one of the biggest governments in recent times.

The government set the parameters on expenditure and revenue. They could not meet those parameters three weeks ago, so they go into a flat panic and start to change everything that they promised. Remember the double drop-off for mums at the last election. The government were going to deliver more than 200 child-care centres. They dropped off the double drop-off. They dropped it off. Those child-care centres—whoosh—disappeared. We remember that they were going to have pink batt program mark 2. Pink batt mark 1 was such a successful program that they wanted to do it all again. They were chiding us to support program mark 2. We did not agree to that—and, thank God, we did not, because they could not hold that policy for 24 days, let alone 24 months.

When it comes to expenditure, the Labor Party never let you down on the programs from the last election. Remember computers in schools—a $1 billion program; it is now $2 billion, probably for half the number of computers. Remember the $150 million solar panel program. It blew out by $850 million. Everything seems to be $1 billion. Everything rounds out at $1 billion. There is $1 billion extra on computers in schools, $1 billion extra on border protection, $1 billion to fix up pink batts, and the government is going to deliver $1 billion surplus in three years time. As if that is a monstrous figure to Labor—a $1 billion surplus in three years time! Roughly, it is somewhere between one-third and one-quarter of one per cent of expenditure under Labor.

The heroic deed out of last night’s budget is that Labor are laying claim to a budget surplus they will never deliver. Labor are laying claim to something three years in the future, and they are doing it heroically as if they have been the poor sods that have had to carry the whole world on their shoulders over the last 12 months. Kevin Rudd saved the world, and now Kevin Rudd is redefining the world as a world that revolves around his spending promises and, today, a world that he says revolves around his values. The Prime Minister is a person who does not have values when it comes to the management of the country. The Prime Minister used the most powerful words a Prime Minister could invoke: ‘the greatest, moral, social and economic challenge of our time’. Imagine if Keating, Hawke, Howard, Whitlam, Fraser, John Curtin, Ben Chifley or Robert Menzies were to use words as powerful as those—you would walk into the trenches with them, you would walk out of the trenches with them, you would follow them to the end of the earth because, as our Prime Minister of Australia, they are using wartime words that declare the greatest challenge for our nation in the view of our leader. And then the Prime Minister dumped that. He claimed just before the dumping that you would be a political coward if you did not move now. The Prime Minister has defined his own person. He is a political coward.

The Prime Minister said: ‘It is the greatest moral, social and economic challenge of our time.’ I will tell you what the greatest moral, social and economic challenge of our time is: it is to get rid of Kevin Rudd. That is our great challenge. And we are going to do it because the Prime Minister is reckless. The Prime Minister is reckless with his words. The Prime Minister is reckless with his actions. The Prime Minister is reckless with his spending. Australians are going to pay a heavy price, because it is not just about the $100 million every day that this government is borrowing in order to spend between now and 2012-13; it goes beyond that. It is a $93 billion debt, with a $6 billion interest bill every year. That is $6 billion that cannot be spent on health, education, national security or defence. It is $6 billion that is not available every year to help the most vulnerable and the most needy in our community.

This government talks about caring but it does not care. This government talks big on rhetoric but it is not a government that is built on substance. It is not a government that is built on values. We have come to the conclusion, as have the Australian people, that the more the government talks about values, the fewer values it has. The more the government talks about courage, oh what little courage it has. The more the government talks about fiscal conservatism—as the Leader of the Opposition identified today—one wonders why it is that they suddenly become fiscal conservatives around election time. It is because the Prime Minister is a chameleon.

Between elections, the Prime Minister spends recklessly. He spends money on a whole range of different things. One that we happened to come across in the budget papers only last night was a $10 million grant to a trade union for an education fund. It is a one-off $10 million grant to one of the Prime Minister’s anti-Work Choices campaign mates, the Trade Union Education Foundation, for the development and delivery of national workplace education programs. Strike me light! Of all the things you could spend $10 million on, a development and delivery program for national workplace education initiatives is the one that would ring the bells.

I was at a fundraiser for Charlie Teo’s Cure for Life on Saturday night where I heard the most distressing stories, as did a thousand other people, about people who have suffered brain tumours. Ninety-four per cent of people who suffer a brain tumour die. It is very sad. As the people from Cure for Life were desperately trying to raise money from the audience I thought to myself: ‘Wouldn’t a million dollars make a huge difference here? Wouldn’t a million dollars or $10 million or $100 million or a billion dollars make a huge difference to the lives of so many people if it were money well spent?’ That is why my colleagues and I get so damned angry about the waste. That is why we get so angry about the government’s spending $1 billion fixing up a pink batts program, spending $1 billion fixing up a failed border protection program and spending $500 million on new health bureaucrats. We get upset because the job of doing the right thing for Australia is unfinished.

Money is precious and our future is precious, but we have a Prime Minister who is careless and reckless. He is reckless with our money and careless with his words. We stand for the right of the Australian people to a prosperous and vibrant land in the future, but the government is doing everything it can to destroy the opportunities for our children and beyond.

See this speech in context