Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Years ago one of my previous occupations was as a debt collector on credit cards. One of my roles was to track down people that had gone well and truly over their limit on credit cards. To go back to the 1980s, what people used to do was ring up and get authorisation, but if your transaction was below the floor limit you would not get authorisation. So we had a guy that I was chasing suddenly appear on the reports having spent an awful lot of money. That was a $1,000 limit on his credit card or his bank card and he is up to $3,500. I looked his account up and everything like that and he had had it for ages, he had ever paid any interest, and I could not understand what was going wrong. So I brought up the transaction list and I found that the last transaction he had was a motel in Emerald. His address was in Charters Towers. I rang the motel in Emerald and said, 'Do you know of this fellow that might have gone through and had recently stayed?' They said, 'Yes, I remember him. He is from up north.' I said, 'Do you know what he was doing?' 'Yes, he was buying fodder for his farm outside Charters Towers near Richmond.' I thought to myself, there is not a farm outside Charters Towers, they are stations, they are big properties.

I am the son of a stock and station agent and I thought to myself, that is a very big ask. So I rang my dad, who was then working at the art gallery in Brisbane. He used to call himself an education officer and used to educate the people to keep their fingers off the paintings. I rang him and said, 'Listen, we've got a bloke going through and it looks like he is buying feed for a cattle station up at Richmond. Would you do that?' He said, 'You could, but it is a little bit like using drugs. At the start it is okay but the real damage comes at the end when you try and control it.'

That is very much what is happening with this budget. What we have seen is that in 2007-08 we had the GFC hit and Labor started spending. What happened was that they could not stop, but sooner or later you have to stop. When it comes to drugs, you either end up dying or you stop. When it comes to budget repair, you lose office. You walk across the room, sit over the other side and you point the finger of blame at people. The problem with blame is that it does not fix anything. Blame is easy—we can all stand around and look at the mess but it is only the people on this side who seem capable of picking it up.

This bill we are talking about, the temporary budget levy bill, is part of our way of saying that we have all got to participate in cleaning up the mess, that we have all got to do our bit. I have had a lot of interaction with people in my electorate. Lots of people have come to me and said, 'I know they had to go, I know we are in trouble, I know we have got debt issues, I know we had to start making payments and I know you had to make changes—but why am I affected?' And lots of people have come to me and make comments about us parliamentarians. As an aside, Deputy Speaker, I wish we still had the defined benefit scheme because you and I both know we do not get the pension but you and I also know that every day someone comes and tells us, 'It's all right for you blokes, you're getting the pension.' I do not whinge about the pay or about our superannuation or benefits—it is what it is. When I was a candidate in 2007 I never made a point of finding out what a parliamentarian would get paid. I figured if I won I would find out sooner or later; if I didn't it was none of my damn business.

It seems everyone considers that the whole thing could be fixed if parliamentarians could be made to work for nothing. I had a bloke come up to me and say, 'It's all right for you blokes, you don't pay any tax.' I said, 'Well, you know, we actually do.' He said he is on $40,000. I said a person on $180,000 earns 4½ times what a person on $40,000 earns—that is obvious. But a person on $180,000 pays nine times the tax of a person on $40,000. The top 10 per cent of wage earners in this country pay over 45 per cent of the nation's income tax. Fifty per cent of families in Australia pay no net tax. There are reasons for that and I would like to develop that argument as I go through because in 1996 we were faced with the same issue.

In 1996 we were faced with the issue of a $10 billion black hole and $96 billion worth of debt. But we had a Treasurer who was prepared to stand up and have a go and we had a Prime Minister who was standing right beside him saying, 'We're going to make tough decisions'—and they did, and we reaped the benefits. The budget was pretty much under control—we had not paid off all the debt—when the Asian financial crisis hit. The Asian financial crisis was very, very local. Working in the finance industry at that time I was very aware of what was going on, and it was very tight out there. What the then Howard government did was that they supported, they spent the money, but then they corrected, and so this nation went into deficit for one year only.

Fast forward to the GFC. We went into deficit, into deficit, into deficit, into deficit, into deficit, into deficit—six in a row—and were unable to stop spending, to the point where, if left undetected, we are looking at gross debt of $667 billion. We are borrowing a billion dollars a month now just to service the debt. To bring this home to everyone in Australia—the member for Longman talked about this earlier in the matter of public interest debate—$667 billion spread across this country is $24,000 per man, woman and child. I have a 12-year-old son at home. When he leaves school I want him to owe a damn sight less than $24,000. I want him to have as good chance as he possibly can. I do not want him to be paying for our mistakes. Again, this gets back to blame: you can blame anyone you want, but what we have got to do here is fix it.

I refer often to the speech made by the then brand-new Treasurer, Joe Hockey, in September last year. He said we had to do three things when we were facing the debt and deficit of the previous government. We had to tell the people what the problem was—and I think we did, although we do have lots of people coming to us saying they never expected there was a debt and deficit problem. So we explained to people what the problem was. Then we had to tell people what we were going to do about, and I think this budget goes a long way to saying that we are going to do something about it because there are significant issues here. The third and most important thing, the Treasurer Joe Hockey said, was that we had to take the people with us when we go. Unlike the Labor Party, where a budget lasted only 48 hours before they made changes, we have a plan and we will take the people of Australia with us because we are worried.

I want to address the issue Labor trot out that our debt to GDP is not great, that it is 11 per cent and one of the lowest in the world. They started with zero and in six years they went from zero to 11 or 12 per cent—from zero net debt to over $500 billion. At the moment, of the OECD countries we have the fastest-growing government spending, from 2012 to 2018, at 16 per cent in real terms. Denmark has minus one. France, that great socialist republic, has only three per cent. Germany has five per cent. Iceland, which was basically bankrupt during the GFC, has only six per cent. Everyone is doing better than us at 16 per cent.

Another issue I want to address is the budget deficits. We have lots of stuff that we could throw around here. We went into budget deficit in 2000-01 or 2001-02. We followed that with surpluses of $7 billion, $8 billion, $14 billion, $16 billion, $17 billion and $20 billion. Following that we have had deficits of $27 billion, $54 billion, $47 billion, $43 billion, $19 billion and $47 billion. That is $191.5 billion worth of deficits. Whether people agree with our summation on the projections is completely up to them. What no-one can deny is that when the Labor government came to power they had zero net debt and money in the bank. What no-one can deny is that they then went on to rack up $191.5 billion worth of budget deficits. And what no-one can deny is that the major spending on education, health, all the stuff that went out there into the never-never, way past anything, where the government was just going to take out a system 30 each week and get the money back. There was going to Lotto-winning inspired recovery.

I do not want to go on all night about this, but everyone has to put in and everyone has to try their best to be part of this. We are going to cop a two per cent tax levy when this goes through. I have not had too many people complain about that, actually. What I have had people say to me is that we said 'no new taxes', and I will address that. We went to the last election promising a levy for our paid parental leave scheme which will address the superannuation needs of women in the workforce, who retire on 35 per cent less superannuation on average than their male counterparts. We went to the election saying that we would support the raised Medicare levy for the NDIS. Tony Abbott stood right there at that dispatch box, where the member for Isaacs is sitting now, and stared down the barrel and said we will not be going ahead with any of the things from the mining tax because we are scrapping the mining tax. We said we would scrap the carbon tax but pensioners would keep the compensation from the carbon tax. We would do that. He stared down the barrel and said that things like the schoolkids bonus and foreign aid are borrowed money—we are borrowing money from overseas to give to overseas people—we cannot progress. He said we would make the hard decisions. We said we would do this hard stuff. So all this stuff about no new taxes just does not hold water.

What I want to say is that this temporary deficit levy is two things. A: it is temporary. B: What it does is show that we are all in this. This is not just one person. We are not just poking the finger at anybody and saying whose fault it is. We are saying that we have to fix it.

I will close with the words of the Prime Minister after the budget had been handed down. He said:

The sustained savings achieved mean that our budget position should strengthen over time to surpluses of well over one per cent of GDP by 2024-25 …

Importantly this path takes into account future tax relief, so we are talking about it being part-time. He goes on to say that 'this improvement in the budget position would see debt decline to $389 billion by 2023-24' compared to the $667 billion which was projected under the status quo left by Labor. As I said before, if we get to $667 billion, that is 24,000 per man, woman and child. If we get it down to that in 2024-25, that means $10,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia. We have a big job in front of us. It is going to take some pretty good people to do it. I believe in our economic team—and I see the birthday boy is sitting at the dispatch box there; I wish the member for Moncrieff a happy birthday. He is a very good man; more than that, he is part of a very solid economic team that is committed to bringing this country back to what it is. We are a great country and we need to get in and we need to fix it up.

The Treasurer said in his speech, 'We are lifters not leaners.' That is a very real statement. We are lifters not leaners. We are workers not passengers. We are asking everyone to make sure that we are coming out of this okay. I thank the House.

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