Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

My colleague the member for Riverina says, ‘Where is it now?’ It has gone, and in its place is a debt of $79 billion. So we have gone from $100 billion in reserves to $79 billion in debt. That is truly extraordinary. I stand to be corrected, but I think that would amount to about $4½ billion of interest—that is, twice what the levy is going to raise.

You can look at this from any angle, but I think the worst thing of the lot is that the Prime Minister tried to characterise this as ‘mates looking after mates’. It is nothing of the sort; it is pure, unadulterated spin by a government that cannot manage and did not want to delve into its reserves properly or plan over a period of three or four years to put sufficient funds aside to look after eventualities like this. Where flooding has occurred, even some of the $1,000 community grants have been badly administered. In fact, the Treasurer said that anybody who applied for one of those and did not need it was ‘low-life’. Even if you met the guidelines, you were still ‘low-life’. But the only low-life are the people who make rules that cannot be adhered to properly or who are cavalier and then try to pull the thing back when it gets out of control. That is where the low-life lies. This is a bad tax. It could have been funded much more easily from another source. It is a disgrace and it is an insult to impose it in the name of mateship on the backs of people who have suffered tragedy.

Debate adjourned.

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