Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Constituents of the good member for Leichhardt here. One responder said: 'I'll be spending it on the ladies, high-class ladies. That is how I will roll.' That is where one of the $900 amounts went. Another one said, 'Tattoos. I'll spend my $900 on tattoos straightaway.' Hell, yes. That will get the money straight back in the economy. Another said, 'Tattoos and guitar stuff. I will also shower my wife with gifts.' But there were a few that were a bit more prudent. One said, 'I'll be paying off my credit card and paying off my electricity bill.' Another said, 'I don't know. I'll probably put it into my other savings account and I will save it.' So this was an extremely poorly targeted stimulus program. It was an awful lot of spending but very little true stimulus to the Australian economy. I think Professor Sinclair Davidson put it best as he put down the idea of the theory behind what the former Labor government did. He said:

The classic argument for fiscal stimulus presumes that the central cause of our current economic problems is this: We, the people and our government, are not doing nearly enough borrowing and spending on consumer goods. The government must step in force us all to borrow and spend more. This diagnosis is tragically comic once said aloud.

He went on to Australianise the comment, outlining the previous Labor government's idea of why they brought these so-called $900 cheques in. He said that this is the theory, the problem that the government identified, that Australians had not been borrowing and spending enough on alcohol, pokies, tobacco and prostitutes and there had not been nearly enough purchasing of plasma televisions. Therefore the government had to step in, borrow money and ensure that more consumer spending occurred in these areas.

This was the true premise of what the previous Labor government did. But what they neglected, and what every single speaker on this bill on the opposition side has failed to mention, is that all the money was borrowed and it has to be paid back at some time by future generations. In the meantime, until that debt is paid back, we have to service the interest. There might have been some excuse for so-called stimulating the economy for a short period of time if the previous Labor government had been able to bring the government budget quickly back into surplus. Maybe there is an argument about short-term stimulus spending. But that argument can only be valid if it is a short period of time, the debt is repaid and the budget returns to balance or into surplus. But this is not what happened under the previous government. Despite the promises, despite the rhetoric that the budget would be returning to surplus, despite the comments we saw of the former Treasurer standing at the dispatch box promising that the budget would return to surplus, this nation now faces the situation that, unless there is a change of policy by the new coalition government, unless we change tack and introduce policies to clean up the mess of the previous Labor government, in four years time this nation will be in debt to the tune of $667 billion. What that does is put the burden on future generations and onto our kids and perhaps even our grandchildren not only to service that interest but to continue sometime in the future to pay the debt off. Just think: if nothing is done and that debt blows out to that $667 billion then we as a nation are going to have to face an interest bill repayment of close to $30 billion a year, over $2 billion a month—two thousand million dollars every month of our nation's wealth will simply go to service interest on the debt that has been racked up by the policies of the previous Labor government. And that has an opportunity cost. We can only wonder at the cost of that. That means higher taxes and lower government services, all because of the debt that the previous government racked up.

The great excuse for the previous Labor government racking up this enormous debt was that they saved the nation from the GFC and they saved all these jobs. The only problem is the number of unemployed people. The unemployment queues today are over 220,000 people longer than they were when the previous government came to office. We can fill the MCG twice with the additional number of people that are unemployed today than there were when the previous Labor government came to office. That is the mess we are in. While we also had these so-called stimulus programs, the previous Labor government gave us the carbon tax and the mining tax. They wrapped up our entrepreneurs and our small business sector, the true creators of our nation's jobs, in red and green tape. In our important building and construction sector, they abolished the commission that we had, the cop on the beat. Everything that they were doing in practical terms had the opposite of a stimulus effect on the economy. The true way to stimulate an economy is to take the shackles off the small business community.

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