Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The subject of today's matter of public importance is this government's failure to appropriately manage the nation's economy. Boy, how much evidence do we have of that? On the night that Wayne Swan brought down last year's budget a few of us, including the members for Kooyong, Macarthur and Durack, went out the back and we shook our heads—how could the Treasurer say he was going to bring down a surplus budget? At that time, the consensus of opinion was that in this budget there would be a $20 billion to $25 billion deficit. We just plucked that figure out of the air, but how close we were to the real mark of $19.4 billion.

The Treasurer had a growth rate in last year's budget of 3.5 per cent. You do not have to be Einstein to go and talk to people who have jobs, who have small businesses or who have big businesses, or to those people who are in the mining industry or who are exporting into Asia—China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. You just had to talk to them and they would have told you that things were not too good. Since 13 months ago, things have only got worse. What is more, the Treasurer in his wisdom still maintained, until November 2012, that he was on track—everything was rosy in the House, everything was rosy in the government, everything was rosy in the country. In December he started to change his mind—'It might be hard to reach the surplus; we might get there but we might not.' Come April, in an outlandish statement he said, 'Bad news—we might have a deficit of about $7 billion.' That was for all of one week. The next week the Prime Minister herself said, 'No Wayne, you are wrong—it is going to be $12 billion.' Holy mackerel, Senator Penny Wong trumped them all with a $17 billion estimate. And she wasn't right! So much for forward projections. They cannot get their projections right for a week's time, so how can they get them right for four years or until 2019? How can they possibly get it right? It is amazing.

In the meantime there have been 30 new taxes brought on by this Labor government and 22,000 new regulations that small business and big business have to interpret and put up with. It is unbelievable. It was supposed to be one in, one out. There were approximately 200 out.

Their notion is power at any cost: 'Keep us in government at any cost. Too bad about our grandkids. Too bad about our kids. Let them pay the debt off.' What a great philosophy to have! They are not thinking ahead at all. They are thinking to the next election, and I hope they can work the odds that the bookmakers are offering at the moment. Our Treasurer talks about a $1.5 trillion economy, but that is mainly tied up in superannuation funds. And who puts the money in the superannuation funds? The Australian people, not the Australian government. So that is his trickery. He compares us with Greece, Italy, Cyprus, my old country of Ireland, Spain and Portugal but does not mention anything about our Asian neighbours China, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore, who are doing very well, with growth rates around five to eight per cent in all those countries.

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