Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Three years ago in his 2010 budget night address, the Treasurer announced:

A strategy that will see the budget return to surplus in three years' time, three years ahead of schedule …

Two years ago the budget speech insisted:

We will be back in the black by 2012-13, on time, as promised. The alternative—meandering back to surplus—would compound the pressures in our economy and push up the cost of living for pensioners and working people.

One year ago he announced:

The four years of surpluses I announce tonight are a powerful endorsement of the strength of our economy …'

On Tuesday this week, in this year's budget, he says:

We have taken the responsible course to delay the return to surplus.

'Delay the return to surplus'! Under Labor there will never be a surplus. In spite of promising 500 times, going way back to 2010, that there would be a surplus in 2012-13, there is no surplus and there is, frankly, no surplus in sight. Five record budget deficits and two more at least yet to come. But no-one really believes that Labor has a plan in place which could actually deliver a surplus. The current Treasurer is pathologically incapable of doing it. The government is incapable of managing its finances to deliver a surplus. The government is so wasteful, so imprudent, so unable to manage its own affairs that there will always be deficits.

What alarms me about this government is that they do not even seem to care anymore about the deficits. We keep getting excuses: 'It doesn't really matter. There are other people with bigger deficits than us, so it doesn't really matter anymore.' What this government with its cavalier approach is doing is sentencing future generations of Australians to paying for their inability to manage their affairs. They are relying on an incoming government sometime in the future to pick up the bills for promises made but not funded in this budget—for the failure to be able to deliver a balanced budget over so many years.

The government has been incapable of balancing this budget, even though it collects $80 billion more in revenue than the last budget of the Howard government. The Treasurer keeps giving us excuses about the global financial crisis, coolness in the resource sector or a range of other excuses. But whatever his excuses are, the facts are he has at his disposal in this budget $80 billion more than the Howard government had in its last budget. That budget produced a surplus. Labor cannot produce a surplus, even with $80 billion worth of extra revenue. The reason for that, fundamentally, is that it is spending $120 billion more than the last Howard government.

People might not mind so much if it were not wasted or if in fact there were genuine measures put in place to ensure that that amount could be paid for. But, in reality, the money has been wasted. Labor is spending its way into deficit. There has been no loss of revenue; there have been increases in revenue. What there has been is an extravagance of expenditure: on pink batts, on overpriced school halls, on all sorts of other wasteful programs—things that in actual fact have not delivered a more productive society.

Today we see complaints again about a loss of revenue. There has been one phrase missing in Labor's rhetoric during this budget—one we heard a lot during the last budget—and that was the phrase that Labor was 'spreading the proceeds of the boom'. Today, the bad news is: there isn't any boom. This government has destroyed it. This government has driven away the incentive to invest. It has taxed away the capacity for people to want to actually invest in this country and deliver the boom. Labor has destroyed the boom. There are no proceeds left to distribute.

You just have to look at the mining tax. When it was originally proposed, Labor said it would collect $4 billion this year. Later they had to revise it downward to $3 billion and then $2.2 billion. But how much are they actually collecting? Two hundred million dollars. That is the proceeds of the boom: $200 million.

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