Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting that this party does not mind wasting other people's money on all sorts of questionable expenses.

I repeat: this is a bad piece of legislation because it is not following through with the original intention of the education rebate. The education rebate was to assist Australian people with educational expenses. This is an attempt to bribe and compensate people for the impact of the carbon tax, which is about to hit them, in a budget which is built on a house of cards, a budget that the Treasurer does not expect to implement because the numbers and the forecasts are so ambitious as to be unbelievable. It has been interesting to note and watch as the Treasurer has failed fundamentally to explain how it is that the ambitious forecasts in his own budget papers, which get to this pretend surplus, will somehow be delivered.

We just have to look at the record. I refer again to the budget papers, which show that in every budget delivered by this Treasurer the result of the budgets have been deficits: $27 billion, $54 billion, $47 billion, $44 billion. Next year the government expects us to believe that somehow there will be a $1.5 billion surplus, a rounding error in the Commonwealth budget purposes. Just look, for instance, at the increase in spending since this government came to power: in 2007-08, the last Costello budget, the spending was $271 billion; this year it is expected to be $364 billion—near enough to a $100 billion increase in just five budgets. It is an extraordinary increase in government spending. It is an extraordinary increase in the power of the state. It is an extraordinary increase in the take from the Australian people. This is what this government does: it taxes big and it spends big. It spends more than it taxes each year. We have seen that; that is the evidence. This bill is another example of this government spending more money than it takes. It does not have an economic plan to make our country stronger and to take advantages of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities we have. Its economic plan is to tax more and spend more—to waste more. We have seen how much money has been wasted. I referred earlier to the one-off payments as part of the stimulus package. We know, for instance, how many dead people, people living overseas and people in jail received those one-off payments.

During that period we also saw the money that was wasted on the pink batts scheme. We know it cost twice as much—it cost $2 billion to take out the $1 billion that the government spent. Why would this bill be any different? Why would this spend be any different? Changing the purpose of the education tax rebate in the first place to make it a cash payment is purely to try to compensate Australian families for the impact of the biggest lie that this Prime Minister has made to the Australian people. This carbon tax is the dagger at the heart of Australian families. This is an attempt to sugar-coat that pill, and it will not work. It will not work, just as this house of cards budget will not work, because we all know in this parliament that this expectation that somehow there is going to be a $45 billion turnaround from this year's deficit into a surplus next year is a flight of fancy. It is built on an extraordinarily ambitious forecast which cannot be met. It is built on the record of a government that has spent more than it has earned every year it has been in power. For five long years the Australian people have had to suffer under this Treasurer.

We should never forget that when this Treasurer took the Treasury off Peter Costello, Peter Costello left this country with money in the bank, a $20 billion surplus. Surpluses of $20 billion are shown in budget papers 2006-07, 2007-08—money going into the Future Fund to plan for the future. A future fund was established so we could meet contingent liabilities as our country gets older and more people retire. All these plans and all these long-term hard decisions that were pursued by the former government and the Treasurer were undone in what seemed like a matter of weeks—in fact, it has been five long years. To expect that that is somehow going to turn around this year, to expect that somehow we are going to have these ambitious forecasts met, and that the government is going to turn it into a surplus budget, is to be ambitious at best.

This bill is a bad bill. It is a bad decision to change the education tax rebate in the first place. It has been rushed because the government knows it needs to change its numbers in a hurry before the Labor Party members change their Prime Minister. We just hope that the Independent members of this hung parliament—a situation we hope never to see in this country again—decide in the best interests of our country—

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