Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It takes a particular type of chutzpah to come into this place and to claim that those on the other side of the chamber were people who delivered honest and accountable government and delivered on their promises and that we on this side of the chamber are not doing so. In fact, it is not just chutzpah; it actually takes a breathtaking arrogance to make such a claim. Let me remind the chamber of the record of the previous Labor government. Let us start with the carbon tax. At the last election, Kevin Rudd claimed that he was going to get rid of the carbon tax. This was off the back of Prime Minister Julia Gillard declaring that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led. So initially they promised not to do it; but they did it. Then they said they would get rid of the carbon tax; but now the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, is blocking us scrapping the carbon tax, as we promised the Australian people we would do, in the Senate. This is quite extraordinary. This is a $9 billion a year tax that they are blocking us getting rid of in the Senate today. If anybody is standing in the way of us delivering on our promises it is, in fact, the Labor Party. They have a very poor record of being able to deliver on theirs.

The second issue I would like to draw the attention of the chamber to today is the claims of the previous government that they would be economic conservatives. Kevin Rudd claimed he would be an economic conservative. Julia Gillard said she would continue on in that tradition—and, boy, did she ever!—and Wayne Swan guaranteed that he was going to be a Treasurer who delivered surpluses. He actually guaranteed this, along with Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, over 500 times. In fact, even when delivering his budget, he said he had done so, that he had delivered a surplus. Many people in the electorate were misled by the previous government because they distributed pamphlets saying it had been done. Of course, their record was to deliver not one surplus over six years. In fact, they delivered six deficits, cumulative deficits that added up to more than $190 billion.

If we did nothing today and simply went down the same path, the same trajectory the Labor Party had set for us, there would be $123 billion of deficit to come and gross debt of more than $650 billion. We are not going to do that, because we acknowledged to the Australian people that we needed to repair the damage done by the previous Labor government, that we needed to repair the national balance sheet. We said that we would do that by making sure that we as a government would live within our means and that we would be true economic conservatives, because we know how to deliver a surplus and we know how to balance a budget.

We have put in place already a Commission of Audit, which, line by line, is going through all of the spending, all of the schemes, all of the programs, put together by the previous government and that we need to repair, and this will form part of our next budget package when it is delivered in May by the Treasurer.

The third thing I want to draw to the attention of the House is border protection. The previous government said it was going to be tough on border protection and dismantled the previous very successful Howard government scheme. We saw more than 50,000 people arrive, unauthorised, by boat, we saw more than $11 billion blow out in the budget as a result and, tragically, we saw more than 1,000 lives lost. We have now put in place Operation Sovereign Borders, and we have done that so as to stem the loss of life on the seas. We have done that because we believe it is important first to have sovereignty on our borders. This has already yielded very strong results. Already, we have seen not one boat arrive for more than 70 consecutive days; whereas at the same time in the previous year under the previous Labor government more than 1,800 people arrive, unauthorised, by boat. So we are delivering on our promises. We are delivering on the promises we made to the Australian people, because we are a responsible government. We believe it is important to keep the trust of the Australian people. We will not have the same failure that the previous government had on this issue of trust, and we will continue to deliver for the people of Australia. (Time expired)

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