David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able speak today on the Tax Bonus for Working Australians Repeal Bill 2013. It is very important that this legislation is passed, because it is a piece of legislation which helps to address the very poor fiscal situation that the current government has been left with by the previous one. But I think it is important, before getting into the detail of this specific bill, to just reflect on the context, because really the context is very simple. That context is: you cannot consistently spend more money than you have. Whether you run a government, a household or a business, you cannot consistently spend more money than you have. If your income is $60,000 a year and you consistently spend more than $60,000 year, you are going to get into trouble. If you are a small business turning over, say, $2 million a year and you consistently have costs of more than $2 million a year, you are going to get into trouble. Equally, if you are a government and you consistently, time after time after time, spend more than you take in then you are going to get into trouble.

Of course, the Labor Party has not actually delivered a surplus budget since 1989. That is a long time ago. That represents about 13 years of Labor government management of the budget in which a deficit position is what occurred. If it happened once or twice you might say, 'Well, that was a reaction to a particular set of circumstances; it was something that needed to be done to respond to external factors,' but when it happens every year for 13 years, it is not a response to particular circumstances; it is just a way of life. And that is the way of life that the Labor Party has put in place when it has had control of the treasury bench. That is unsustainable and certainly not something we can continue with.

The bill before us today is an important piece of legislation because it stops $900 cheques being paid to people under a program that was created to address a situation five years ago. So, remarkably, under the previous government, they were still paying $900 cheques to people to address an economic situation which occurred some five years ago.

I have noticed that members opposite have made some comments to the effect that these are not large amounts of money and that it is only a few million dollars here and a few million dollars there, but certainly, in my experience of life—and, I am certain, in the experience of life of most Australians—millions of dollars are a lot of money. And it is the Australian people's money, because that money has been generated by their enterprise and hard work, whether as pay-as-you-go tax payments, company tax, capital gains tax or any of the other ways in which Australians contribute revenue to this government. The government does not create that money; the people do. The people create the money. And it is incumbent upon the government to treat every dollar of the taxpayers' money with respect. That did not occur under the Labor government and this particular program is quite symptomatic of that failure.

One of the extraordinary things in this program is that a large number of payments have actually been sent to people who are in fact overseas. Again, it is very difficult to stimulate the Australian economy if you are not actually inside the Australian economy. We have seen 16,000 stimulus payments totalling about $40 million sent to people who are not even here—not even in the country. It is very difficult for those people to stimulate the economy, given that they are away from our shores. There is a similar situation in relation to dead people. So $18 million has been paid to people who are in fact deceased, under this program. Again, it is very difficult for those recipients to stimulate the economy!

It does concern me when the response from the other side is: 'These are small amounts of money in the scheme of things; this is a manageable issue.' Well, it is not manageable at all. It is a significant problem. It is completely unacceptable for the federal government to have such disregard for the funds of the taxpayers of Australia, and it has to stop. That is why the passage of this legislation is so important, because it will stop any further cheques being issued under a program that was designed for circumstances that were in place some five years ago.

I think that this program is symptomatic of Labor's budget management in general. In the six years of the Rudd, Gillard and Rudd governments, some hundreds of billions of dollars of debt were run up. We know that is the case. That is the situation we now find ourselves confronted with. We also know though, after MYEFO, that, on the current course, the current financial year deficit is on track to be some $47 billion and, over the next four years, there will be total deficits of $123 billion over the forward estimates period—an extraordinary amount of money, especially when that is on top of the very substantial debts of hundreds of billions of dollars that had been built up in the preceding years. It is so bad, in fact, that, at the end of 10 years, if we simply followed the strategy that Labor had in place for the Australian economy and more particularly for the budget of the federal government, we would have gross debt of $667 billion. That is an extraordinary amount of money, and I think it actually means that we have to introduce a new word into the discussion of fiscal balances in Australia. The word is 'trillion', because $667 billion is two-thirds of $1 trillion. So the trajectory set under Labor, if nothing changes, is for a gross debt of some two-thirds of $1 trillion within a decade—$667 billion. That is completely unacceptable to the Australian people, and is certainly not something that this government will allow to occur. It is very important that we pass this bill as a clear message that there is new management in town, and it has respect for the taxpayers of Australia.

It is worth reflecting on how we got here. How did we get to this situation? You do wonder how a government could get the finances of the country into such an extraordinary situation. Sometimes you should look at the very large programs and sometimes at the small programs because those small programs demonstrate an attitude and a way of thinking about the budget. They also demonstrate that the previous government did not regard the money within the federal budget as dollars that must be protected because they had been created by the hard work of ordinary Australians, but rather as money to, frankly, be thrown around as the government saw fit.

We saw a big budget blow-out of more than $6 billion in the border protection area—a failed humanitarian policy and, certainly, a failed financial policy. The blow-out under the previous government was $6 billion. On the theme of large amounts and smaller amounts, we should never forget that the previous government, as part of its supposed border protection policy, spent $2.1 million of Australian taxpayers' money on a shameful advertising campaign promoting its border protection policies. You may recall, Deputy Speaker, much of that money was spent on advertising on FM country radio stations and in suburban newspapers, many of which I suspect are not widely read by people smugglers, and yet the previous government was very willing to hand over that taxpayer money for its own political purpose, which is an outrage.

The BER scheme has of course been well documented. There was extraordinary wastage there. I think the BER scheme really shows the lack of attention to operational detail that we saw in the previous government. They had a press release led strategy, when running a significant government program is about the detail, hard work and making sure that you get value for the taxpayer. We did not see that at all in the procurement processes in the BER scheme which were, frankly, all over the place and wasted an extraordinary amount of money.

The NBN is another example of appalling financial management under the previous government. The strategic review that was recently completed identified a huge amount of wastage on Labor's watch. Way behind schedule and way over the budget is never a good combination, and that is what we saw time and time again with the NBN. We have seen tens of millions of dollars spent advertising the NBN to people who cannot get it because it is not available. We have seen money spent on advertising the NBN saying that it is free when it is not and have seen, frankly, extraordinarily irresponsible carriage of public policy in that area.

Live export is another example. You will recall that the previous government, in what can only be described as a knee-jerk reaction, basically ended the live export industry overnight in response to media reports. Unsurprisingly, that had a disastrous impact on the people working in that industry, many of whom are from electorates in northern Australia. The thinking in the previous government was, 'They are obviously not very happy about this and this hasn't quite worked out how we thought it might, so let's put in place an assistance package.' That assistance package cost $100 million. If the knee-jerk policy had not been put in place in the first place, there would not have been any requirement for that $100 million assistance package. But it was required because the policies of the previous government were very much about managing the daily news and the media cycle, as opposed to doing the substantive work, which is what real government is about.

One of my colleagues mentioned set-top boxes a little earlier. I know a little bit about set-top boxes and I can tell you that you can buy them for a lot less than $350. That is what the government paid for them. They spent $67 million on this program, and that wasted literally tens of millions of dollars. The pink batts scheme cost close to $3 billion. There is a whole series of other programs, and I hesitate to raise them because they are such sad reminders of another time, but I think it is important that we commemorate names like GroceryWatch, Fuelwatch, Green Loans, Green Start and the solar homes program in this House.

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