Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you Madam Speaker, and may I like others in this debate take this opportunity to congratulate you on your elevation to the role of Speaker.

It has been an interesting debate. It has been fascinating to hear members of the Labor Party, now in opposition, lecturing the government about what should be happening with respect to the debt limit. I have to say that it must be a novel approach for a large number of the Labor Party members, because I suspect that many of them would have had to check their speaking notes before walking into the chamber to confirm that they were in fact going to be arguing for a lower debt limit rather than an increased debt limit, because it stands in stark contrast to the last six years of the Australian Labor Party's track record when it came to their performance in government. We all know the narrative, which is that when the coalition lost office in 2007 we left no debt and actually left assets in the bank, so to speak. Over the next six years, the Australian Labor Party ran this down substantially.

We know that the Australian Labor Party has poor form when it comes to budgeting. We already know that the shadow Treasurer—who has just walked back into the chamber—clearly has trouble doing numbers and adding up. This is the shadow Treasurer who could not work out that if the PEFO, the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, was for $370 billion of gross debt. That is gross debt, not net debt, shadow Treasurer—he kept getting that number confused. Couple the $370 billion in gross debt with the fact that you actually had the Australian Office of Financial Management making it clear that you needed a $40 billion to $60 billion buffer, the $370 billion plus $60 billion puts you north of $400 billion to begin with.

Although the Labor Party's form is to come in and say, 'Well, we'll set the debt limit at X level and then we'll come back and ask for more if we need it,' that is not the approach of this government. We do not want to have to keep coming back and asking for more money. We already know—to pre-empt the amendment the shadow Treasurer has made clear he is going to introduce—that the Labor Party says, 'No, we think the limit should be $400 billion.' And, strangely, the Greens have also signed up to a $400 billion debt limit—but with that you would be flat out funding one of their policies, I suspect. That notwithstanding, the Greens and Labor have once again done a deal, and it is appropriate that a deal should be done on the first day of this new parliament, because it is entirely consistent with the deals that were done between the Greens and the Labor Party over the past six years.

What is it that we are actually talking about here? This bill seeks to amend the Commonwealth Inscribed Stock Act 1911 to increase the legislative debt limit from $300 billion to $500 billion. The legislative limit has been lifted three times since it was introduced in 2008. It was effectively increased from $75 billion to $200 billion in 2009, then increased to $250 billion in 2011 and then increased to $300 billion in 2012. The face value of Commonwealth government securities on issue that are subject to the limit has increased from around $50 billion when the limit was introduced in 2008, to over $285 billion today. Commonwealth government securities on issue are projected to increase further. We do not want a repeat of this situation—

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