Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before I speak at length about appropriation bills 3 and 4, you may recall that earlier the member for Fraser asked a question as to why the bills were referred to the economics committee. I, being a lowly rank backbencher, am not privy to those conversations in Cabinet or wherever they come from as to why the bills were sent to economics committee. But I can only assume that potentially maybe it was a trust issue? I think that last session the appropriation bills 3 and 4 were a vehicle to lift that debt ceiling from 200 to 250, buried deep in the documents. Maybe their logic in sending them to us was to highlight the amount of money that is going towards the clean energy bill. There is a substantial amount of funds allocated to that in the bills in those line items. Maybe it was a vehicle to highlight to the nation bills that we oppose—just how much this thing is going to cost. But without being privy to those discussions higher than I, I can only hypothesise.

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4). The first point I feel I ought to make is that these appropriations are perfect examples of the sort of creative accounting that the government uses to protect its estimates for a surplus in 2012-13. Earlier this year, I wrote an op-ed about the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, in which I discussed the highly questionable practices of hiding funding for government projects off budget. I confess that when I first heard the phrase, I did not know what it meant. How can something be off budget? I run a sizable transport interest in Queensland and it was not a practice known to me with our internal accounting procedures. I sat on a number of boards, and off-budget practices were not something that I saw in the corporate boardrooms. I was a corporate banker and specialised in agri-finance. I had a little knowledge of what an off-budget expenditure was. I find it hard, even today, so that is why I wrote about. How can you tip $18 billion into the NBN and another $10 billion in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and not have to account for it in a budget just because you have got a hunch that it might make a return on an investment one day?

Every investment property in this country was purchased because someone hoped that they would make a return on their investment one day. You just cannot exclude the mortgage from your budget because you reckon the prices are going to go up. You just cannot disregard the payments on a wish and a prayer. The debt is there. The debt really counts. It will be a fact when it comes time to borrow again, hunch or no punch in the family budget. We have seen how much that hunch looks. In the case of the NBN, the company had such strong fundamentals that the government had to force any potential competitor to rip their cables out of the ground. What a great investment it must be and how excited we should all be to be part of it. 'Meet the NBN' is giggled at around the world with its costings per head. It is extremely expensive when it comes to world standards.

But getting back to my concept of spending off budget: how many mums and dads out there do you reckon would be able to keep huge chunks of their debt off their ledger? How many businesses do you think out there would be able to keep huge parts of their debt off their ledger?

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