Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Tax Bonus for Working Australians Repeal Bill 2013. All of us in this House—my colleagues on this side of the House—view debt very seriously. They view taxpayers' money very seriously. As someone who is a small business owner, someone who has built a small business from scratch, I know a lot about debt as well. I do know that when you front up to the bank to borrow money, you actually have to be able to prove that you can pay it back, that you can make your commitments. That is what we have always had to do as a business. Every time we have borrowed money we have had to demonstrate very clearly to the bank that we could actually pay off what we borrowed and that we had the capacity to pay it off.

But when I sat here, as many of my colleagues did, from 2007-08 and we watched the decisions made by the Labor government of the day, I had no words. I sat on the other side of the chamber and I could not believe the decisions that were being made. But, more importantly, I could not believe the ease with which debt was being committed to. Taxpayers' dollars were being committed, and what was being done with them—without appropriate scrutiny, without accountability and even, in some instances, without any form of regulation—was a bit like a free-for-all. There was almost an air of desperation around the government at the time. It was actually appalling to sit in this chamber and watch the announcements parade in. There was almost an air of excitement about what was going to be announced next. But what we did not see—and what appalled me as a small business person who had had to borrow and demonstrate how we were going to pay debts off—was how it was going to be paid off. We never ever saw that, and I sat here day after day after day waiting to hear the plan as to how this was going to be paid off. How was the government going to generate surpluses to pay off the debt and deficit for things like $900 stimulus cheques? I never ever heard it. We are still waiting for that. We have waited for so long that we have now had a change of government—and what we are looking at is that if we do not make tough decisions, and the right decisions, then in the medium term the debt will be $667 billion.

But there is another side to this. I have sat still and listened to what Labor have said since the election and since the release of the MYEFO figures. I think we need to keep a tab on what else is being promised, what else the Labor government historically and now Labor opposition said they would do if they were in government, because the $667 billion is just the minor end of the deal if they were in government. If you have continuous spending, with no concern and no plan to pay it back, you cannot run a business, let alone a household, and certainly not the Australian economy. But that is what we have seen and that is what would still be happening if there had not been a change of government. Where was the plan? I saw so many of them, one after the other, come into this place and with great excitement talk about how they were going to spend taxpayers' money next. I looked for the plan as to how it would be paid off, and the thing that dismayed me most is that I realised that this is about intergenerational debt.

Each successive government should come into this place with the idea of leaving the condition of the parliament and the condition of the country better than what they found it. But that is not what we have inherited. We know that Labor inherited surpluses and savings when they came to government. That gave them the flexibility to make decisions about how they would spend it. Then they decided that they would accumulate the amount of debt and deficit that we see today—literally, they were out of control. We need to take every single measure that we can to reduce that. Even in the way we allocate our spending and in the scrutiny we apply to what we do, there will be a far different approach from what Labor had. That is what people right around Australia, and particularly in my electorate, are expecting. That is what they voted for. They voted for those who could be in charge of the budget, for those who would make good decisions, and certainly not decisions like this one we are debating: the $900 cheques that were just handed out. We have also heard about the length of time that these cheques have been running—long after the stimulus package itself.

Being a farmer and someone from rural and regional Australia, I was very interested that there were claims made at the time about the various measures that might have kept Australia out of technical recession. When I looked at the figures, it was the agricultural exports that kept us out of technical recession, but I never heard anything about that from the other side of politics. Labor never ever acknowledged that. They claimed that it was because of a range of their measures, but when you looked at the figures you saw that it was the agricultural exports—the people in our rural and regional areas just toughing it out, day after day, doing what they do best. We know that they are some of the best producers of food and fibre in the world. They just kept at it right throughout that global financial crisis and kept Australia out of technical recession. But I never heard that from the other side of this House.

This measure was just one of so many wasteful spending measures decided on by the Labor government. There were verdicts left, right and centre about how well this was spent. The other side has had a lot to say, but I have looked at what was said by some others and I saw an article from The Australian entitled 'Damning verdict on the stimulus'. The article was written by Adam Creighton and it included discussion about the $8 billion worth of cheques and comments by Mr Tony Makin, an Australian economics professor. There were also comments from a Treasury official that showed Australians on average spent only an extra dollar of their $900 windfall. I remember hearing at the time in this place that this was supposed to be the biggest stimulus for the retail sector. If the people receiving the cheques only spent a dollar of it at the time, where was the stimulus for the retail sector that was meant to happen? The article quotes the authors of a paper saying:

The effect of the fiscal transfer on the change in household consumption expenditures is insignificant and quantitatively small—the average household spent less than 0.2 per cent of the income windfall.

So there have been a range of people who have had a look at the stimulus; it is not just what is being said on this side of the House.

We saw money literally flying out the doors. Much has been said by my colleagues about where that money went. We saw $2.5 billion spent on the pink batts program, and we saw what happened with that. There was inappropriate planning; there was a lack of accountability. We saw a similar thing with the school halls program, and a lot has been said about that and the types of projects that were built. Like my colleagues, I had people come to see me about the obscene waste and the fact that they were not allowed to build what their school actually needed. We also saw money wasted going into GP superclinics, with all sorts of promises. This was taxpayers' dollars. What I could never get over when I looked across the chamber was that it was almost like it was somebody else's money and it just did not matter where it went or how it went. It was somebody else's money, somehow, and no responsibility was taken for how it was spent. Well, I take it really seriously and my colleagues on this side take it extremely seriously, which is why we are committed to the measures we are taking. When I saw the ridiculous waste of GroceryWatch, I just thought, 'What the?' When I went out in my communities throughout the south-west, people would say to me, 'What is going on?' It was same with the Fuelwatch idea, and everything from Green Start to solar homes—it was like there was money just flying out the door.

I will go back to where I started. What bothered me most was that there was no plan from Labor to pay any of this off. Right up until the election, we did not see a plan to pay off any of this. It was on the never-never, on the tick, someone else's problem, and now we see exactly where that has led us as a nation. I look around my electorate—like my colleagues do in theirs—and imagine what I could do with the interest bill alone, of $10 billion a year. Imagine the good programs and projects that we could all be doing with the interest. Look at health; look at ageing—there are so many areas where there are people in need, and yet we see this extraordinary and dreadful waste. I can recall the dismay that I felt as I looked across at the faces on the government side. I never saw one ounce of accountability on any face; no sense of responsibility at all. It was somebody else's money and it did not matter. Well, it matters to us. That is why we will take the measures necessary, and this is one of them.

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