Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

As long as they vetted the interest repayments, I suppose you would! But I would want to make sure I had a lot of security. I would want to go out and inspect the homes, have a look at the cars and check out the health of the first born! I would want to be absolutely sure. If I were leaving money to someone in the Labor Party I would want to make sure I had a lot of security—because Labor has broken every debt limit it has had. They see it as a debt target, not a debt limit. That is the thing. We do not want to have to come back to this place and increase the debt limit. We want to deal with it now, get it out of the way and get on with the job of starting to pay down the debt, get on with the job of paying off the mortgage, ensuring that no future generation has to cop the economic incompetency of Labor.

To be frank, who knows what lies ahead? We do not know. I hope that the economy continues to get better. I hope that the world economy continues to get better. We do not know, but we are being responsible. What we do know is that every cupboard we open has spiders in it. What we know is that Labor trashed the joint when they were in government and now they are trying to stop us from fixing it. How do we know? As we go through individual agencies we are starting to discover that the agencies were significantly underfunded. The former Treasurer says that it is okay to run at a loss. It is okay to run at a loss until you run out of money that is actually covering the loss.

That is exactly where the ACCC is, for example. They were instructed to run down their reserves, until the point where they had no reserves left, but they were still making a loss. It is inconceivable, from my perspective, and it is unacceptable, from my perspective, that you should ever allow any entity—whether it be a taxpayer entity or a private-sector entity—to continue to run at an unsustainable loss, because sooner or later it ends up in tears. I would say to the member for McMahon and his colleagues in the Labor Party: you are fully responsible for this, whether it be the ACCC or a range of other institutions that we are going through now, and we will identify where those problems are.

It is also patently clear that the economic growth forecasts have been revised down into the future. Why? It is because the Labor Party was not fair dinkum about the terms of trade coming off. The Labor Party was not fair dinkum about the growth forecast. The Labor Party was not fair dinkum about the unemployment rate.

The Reserve Bank recently published a downgrade in its forward estimates, in its forecasts for economic growth. As the former Treasurer knows, they are not significantly different to where the government will go. Therefore, it is going to have an impact. It will obviously have an impact on the budget bottom line. But they knew this was coming. We were warning about it after the budget was delivered. And, in the 11 weeks between the budget being delivered and this man, the member for McMahon, delivering an economic statement, the budget deteriorated by $33 billion—in 11 weeks. That is quite the record—$33 billion! The only person that has surpassed that record is his predecessor. The member for Lilley has a record I hope no-one will ever beat—a deterioration in budget numbers.

It comes back to basic incompetence, like with the mining tax. They originally forecast that tax would raise nearly $50 billion over five years. It ended up raising less than $5 billion. In fact, it raised $400 million—a tax that originally, as an RSPT, was going to raise $50 billion. The problem was that they committed the expenditure against it. That is why we have to get rid of the mining tax and the expenditure against it—because the expenditure against it is costing the budget over $13 billion. If we do not do that, the debt will go up. This is what we have inherited. We have inherited a legacy of debt and deficit. Our predecessors trashed the house, they were terrible tenants, and now they will not let us go to the bond to try and recover just a fraction of the challenges associated with the costs of clean-up.

The Labor Party are now playing a game of Russian roulette, but what they do not understand in relation to debt limits is that the barrel is fully loaded. If they choose to pull the trigger, there can only be one outcome for them. The problem is that there will be ancillary pain for the Australian people. We will not let Australia in any way reach a point where we have to breach the debt limit. I will not do it; the coalition will not do it. We will put in place a responsible approach to this issue. When they pick up a paper or when they listen to the TV or the radio, they need look no further than the diabolical position in the United States, which will deteriorate again in January and beyond.

Mr Bowen interjecting—

What the member for McMahon just cannot get into his head is that, if you do not reduce expenditure, if you have a lower debt limit, you actually have to have more severe cuts. And the Labor Party will own those cuts. Let me be sure.

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