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

I thank the member for Moore for the question. I recognise that he knows, as I know and now the Australian people know, that Labor left behind deficits of $123 billion. On the estimation of the Treasury, the budget would never have got to surplus under Labor. The only way to repay debt is by having a surplus. The Labor Party's legacy is $667 billion of government debt, unless we can get the budget back to surplus.

We have not mucked around in trying to address this. One of the first things we did was to introduce legislation to repeal the mining tax and all its associated expenditure. The Labor Party's great benchmark legacy of incompetence was the multitude of designs associated with the variations on the mining tax. How incompetent could you be in designing a tax that raised on average $20 per person over the last three years but has $700 per person of expenditure over the next four years associated with that revenue? Only Labor could introduce a new tax that leaves the budget worse off. That is the peak of incompetence, and they met it last term. They all have to accept responsibility.

What did we do? We came into this parliament, said we were getting rid of the tax and we have to get rid of the expenditure associated with it. We have to take the hard yards, and that starts on our turf. We made those decisions. We went to the electorate and said, 'We're sorry, Australia, we had to get rid of the schoolkids bonus.' We said that not because there is any ideological satisfaction in it, but because we knew that it was unfair to burden our children with the debt of handouts to parents today. Every dollar that goes out is borrowed from our children. The bottom line is: Labor does not care about that, but we do. We care about intergenerational debt.

The Labor Party are now opposing $20 billion of savings that are sitting in the Senate. It gets worse every day, because the longer those savings are delayed, the less opportunity there is to repair the budget now. Labor do not care about the future. They do not care about the future at all, and that is why they do not care about deficit and debt. That says everything about the Labor Party.

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