Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Deputy Chairman , Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

At first I thought that it is just a reflection on the Assistant Treasurer. I should not single out our old friend the admiral; this is just him. I should not generalise and say that this is a Labor Party trend, but then I was reminded, I regret to say, that this is in fact a trend with those opposite. We had the Treasurer last year say: 'They have their heads stuck so far in the sand they cannot see the wood for the trees.' This is just a small illustration of the competence of those opposite. Of course, if they mix their metaphors on something so simple, it is no wonder they cannot get any of their budget numbers right.

Mr Ripoll interjecting—

I am invited to attack you on debt and I will. Thank you for the invitation. I was not going to forget in the last seven minutes, but since you have asked me to recite the debt story, I think I will, because you failed to mention it. As my friend the member for Higgins has been pointing out—you said you listened to those opposite—$96 billion was the level of net government debt left behind by the Hawke-Keating government.

We had the Assistant Treasurer saying, 'What did those opposite do when they got into power in 1996? They reduced spending.' Why would we have done that? All through the election campaign in those days before the Charter of Budget Honesty you had Labor ministers saying that the budget was in surplus. When the election was over and there was a new government the Treasury said, 'Actually the budget's in deficit by $10 billion.' Net government debt was $96 billion. It took more than a decade of responsible budgets to pay off $96 billion of net government debt. In fact debt-free day, I think, was on 20 or 21 April 2006. It took 10 years to pay it down.

What happened after that with surpluses? Money began to be banked into the Future Fund—something Wayne Swan is looking at very closely today.

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