Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Hansard source

The member shakes his head. There were years and years of poor budget performance in New South Wales, and now the O'Farrell government is once again cleaning up the mess. And it is a pattern that the Australian people know so well. Go into any public bar in regional Australia, perhaps even suburban Australia, and ask people about the Australian Labor Party. Ask, 'Can the Australian Labor Party manage money?' and you will not find a single person in that bar who believes that the Australian Labor Party is good with taxpayers' money. It is accepted wisdom throughout Australia that Labor cannot manage money. Every time Labor gets to the Treasury benches they prove themselves incapable of managing balanced budgets.

So we have this motion here from the member for Blair, talking about providing funding for employment and skills services and continuing to invest in TAFEs as if the Labor Party is the only party that cares about investing in skills. Well, here is a news flash for the member for Blair: members on this side are equally as passionate about this issue, but we just have this feeling that you have to be able to pay for it; one day you have to pay the bills. Unfortunately for those in the Labor Party, they never have to pay the bills; they just leave it for the Liberals and Nationals to come into government and clean up the mess. In the last month, as members of the Labor Party walked into this place, you could have sworn they were running for state parliament. You could have sworn that the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and a whole assortment of the gaggling crowd opposite are running for state parliamentary seats, because they do not want to talk about the federal parliament anymore; all they want to talk about is what New South Wales is doing, what Queensland is doing, what Victoria is doing. You would have thought that at least one member opposite actually cared about the state of the Australian budget and what is actually happening in this parliament. Then again, if I were presiding over another budgetary mess, with a $120 billion budget black hole, the last thing I would want to talk about would be the federal parliament. So we have Anna's mess, we have Brumby's and Bracks's mess, we have the mess of whoever was leading New South Wales for about 15 years—all their mess—and now we have Kevin's and Julia's mess to clean up.

The previous speaker was right: there are some people in this place who have form on this, and it is the Labor Party. We cannot afford Labor governments at state level, and we certainly cannot afford Labor governments at federal level.

Debate adjourned and made an order of the day for the next sitting.

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