Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am getting to that, Mr Deputy Speaker. The thing about the discussion today is that the CCTV cameras have caught up with the government. We saw that with the budget. Here we had the Treasurer promising, over 300 times, that there would be a budget surplus. The Prime Minister, I think, had done it on numerous occasions as well—maybe over 100—yet what we saw in the budget was the CCTV cameras catching up with this government.

We saw, once again, we were going to get a budget deficit that was going to add to the five largest budget deficits in Australia's history. We saw that net debt was spiralling past $150 billion. Gross debt was $300 billion. The CCTV cameras caught up with the government when it came to the budget, and we have seen it again today. The World Competitiveness Yearbook has come out, and we have seen what it has had to say. The competitiveness result for Australia is the worst in the last 17 years. What has produced this?—21,000 new regulations and 39 new or increased taxes.

What have people had to say about this? If you read Paul Kelly today—the honourable member sitting next to me, the member for Berowra, has pointed this out to me—you will see that even Labor's own economists are coming out to criticise this government. Ross Garnaut warns that tolerating a business-as-usual policy now means the decline in average living standards will be large and the lift in unemployment will be persistent and large. That is what Labor's own economist has to say on this.

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