Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be speaking to these appropriation bills. The sense of denial from the members opposite is absolutely staggering. The Abbott government's first budget is the medicine we might not want to take but it is necessary if we want to get the state of the nation's finances to get better. As I have said in this place previously, my nonna often told to me as a child that if the medicine tasted good, the patient would never want to get better. On that rationale, the Labor Party must love being sick because they certainly love making budgets sick. Six years of Labor in office delivered $191 billion in record budget deficits, $123 billion forecast in cumulative deficits and gross debt heading towards a staggering $667 billion, and if nothing was done that would blow out even further by 2017-18 to a deficit of at least $30 billion.

Far from being impressive numbers, these are disastrous numbers, all delivered by a prime ministerial candidate who in the lead-up 2007 election described himself as a fiscal conservative. I shudder to think what would have happened to the debt if former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had been a fiscal progressive. What sort of debt levels would we be looking at right now if he had not made the comment that he was a fiscal conservative? Labor's debt performance is even worse when notice is taken of the fact that when they left office in 1996 —and I was here then; I have had the wonderful and rare opportunity of representing two federal electorates—Australia had a $20 billion surplus and $50 billion in the bank. Without the coalition's plan, Australia will be forced to continue borrowing a billion dollars a month every single month, and that is just to pay off the interest. But those opposite do not want to talk about that. As my parliamentary colleague and fellow Queenslander, the honourable Steven Ciobo, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, said in the House yesterday: to put it in household budgetary terms, that is the equivalent of paying your household debts with your credit card. It is ludicrous, it is not responsible and it is not sustainable.

If we do not act now, in ten year's time interest payments on Australia's debt will be a staggering $2.8 billion a month. Right now, that is $1 billion that Australian taxpayers have to find every month just to pay off the interest on Labor's debt, and that is $12 billion a year. Just think of that, $12 billion a year. What would be the positive impacts that level of expenditure would have on our roads? Just think how much NDIS funding that would provide, how many dental services, how many positive employment programs. Just think of all those skills training courses that could be provided to get Australians up with the skills and knowledge that they need to get jobs. But we cannot do these things when we want—and we need to thank Labor for leaving this enormous debt.

These are the facts that Labor does not want the people of Australia to know. In many respects, Labor's astonishing level of denial in relation to the budgetary mess they have left behind can be likened to naughty children caught raiding the pantry—hands in the cookie jar, mouths full of lollies and chocolate smeared all over their faces—while at the same time they are trying to deny that they were ever even there. This analogy, however, does not actually capture the gravity or the extent of Labor's delusion.

There is a bizarre sort of political strategy to Labor's denial. Why try and defend the indefensible? Which is what the Labor's budgetary performances have been over the last six years, absolutely indefensible. Instead, what Labor sought to do was to flip the issue on its head and to make outlandish claims—that even they cannot believe—along the lines of they left the budget in a healthy state and that we do not have a budget emergency. They continually deny that there is a budget emergency. If Labor's woeful fiscal performance of the past six years was not enough to prove that they are unfit for office then their current grossly irresponsible short-term political gains just confirm it.

The government has committed itself to reducing spending in a slow and measured way. But rather than taking their medicine and being part of fixing the mess they made, Labor has committed itself to blocking key measures that are worth now over $40 billion over the forward estimates. This is a strangely bizarre and very schizophrenic stance for Labor to adopt given that their very infamous Treasurer in office, Treasurer Wayne Swan, so often spoke in the last six years about 'living within our means'. He would say it over and again, 'living within our means'. But that was never something that Labor actually did in office. Their focus always was on talking the big game, but they never ever played it. At least they claimed that they were trying to but they never had the guts to go out there and make the real decisions, the tough decisions that would be good for the nation in the long term.

Something that stands out in stark contrast is the change that the Abbott government's first budget set in place. It is a fact that we had the guts to face the mess that Labor left and start the difficult process. Yes, it is a difficult process; it is a very hard process. By way of contrast, Labor has no alternative policy position other than its obsessive commitment to keeping Australia in debt. They had no plan in office and they have got no plan out of office. It is so extraordinary to hear them speak and it is so obvious to all that they have absolutely no plan except playing the negativity game.

This leads me to the next issue I would like to highlight—that is, the level of trauma that the Australian people have endured under the Rudd-Gillard and then Rudd circus when Labor was in office—and it was trauma. They were subjected to a level of trauma that they are still recovering from.

It is widely acknowledged and accepted that Labor in office during the last six years delivered one of the worst governments in this country's history. As I spoke with the people in my electorate leading into and during the federal election campaign last year and in my ongoing conversations with them this year, they are still traumatised. This trauma makes our job that much harder. We have to do better in communicating to the Australian people exactly what we are doing, and how and why we are cleaning up Labor's mess.

I am already on the public record as saying governments need to stop playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Australian public as to what is in and what is not in the budget. People are sick of these games. They have been played by all sides of politics for far too long. There has to be a better process where we have closer integration between the parliament and the executive in the development of the budget, and the reporting of these processes should be formulated in the future to provide certainty.

To that end, I was concerned about the debt levy when it was first mooted in the media and was the subject of a speculated level of $80,000, which in my view would have been grossly unfair. To those commentators from the left and the right, who chose to misinterpret my comments as pandering to high-income earners in my electorate, I say this: the only thing more dangerous than a little bit of knowledge about something is no knowledge about it at all. The median personal income level in my electorate is $45,084.

I am a great believer in the willingness of the Australian people to put their shoulder to the wheel. When they see a job that needs to be done, that we need to make the tough decisions and structural reforms have to be undertaken through this budget, it is a task that is worthy of them, and many people in my electorate understand that there are tough times ahead. They understand that they need to work with us to put Australia back on the right track.

We cannot deny that we have an ageing population. We cannot deny that our level of expenditure exceeds our level of earnings. Again, it is not sustainable. This job is made that much harder by Labor's scare campaign, which, far from being designed to be part of the solution, is focused squarely on ensuring that Australia will always be mired in the debt that they created.

In taking the medicine that this budget delivers for Australia, we want to be in a position where, as a nation, we are not comparing ourselves to the worst, and those opposite always want us to compare ourselves to the worst; we want to compare ourselves to the best. In terms of comparing ourselves to the worst, we are right up there as being the worst or very close to it. In terms of the fastest growing debt amount from the IMF Article IV assessment of advanced economies, for the six years between 2012 and 2018, Australia is forecast to have the third largest increase in net debt—that is in percentage terms of GDP amongst profiled IMF advanced economies. That puts us ahead of the likes of Sweden, Canada and the USA. So, thanks to Labor, we are getting the bronze medal—yes, the bronze medal for the fastest-growing net debt—probably not an award that we would really want. For the six years to 2018, Australia is forecast to have the largest percentage increase in spending. Again, thanks to Labor, we have won the gold medal for the fastest-growing level of expenditure.

Our spending is growing faster than the likes of Korea, Canada, Germany, France and Japan. This is Labor's legacy, because of their big-spending promises and their waste. As I pointed out earlier, the longer we stay on this course, the more vulnerable the nation will become to global economic shocks. Without a fiscal buffer, governments are unable to respond to future crises, the pain of which falls on the poor and the disadvantaged—precisely the people Labor would have us believe they serve and protect.

More directly, for the electorate of Brisbane, I am really pleased to confirm the Abbott government's responsible management of the budget has resulted in funding for all of the election promises and for all of them to be delivered. These projects are to commence in 2014-15 and include the GPS Rugby Club Ashgrove facilities upgrade of $200,050,000; an upgrade to the Broncos Leagues Club ground redevelopment, which will be a huge community development as well as a sports training facility for $5 million; the Brisbane Inner North Sporting Community's facility upgrade of 750,000; and a wonderful grant of $125,000 to OzHarvest, which is responsible for picking up food from restaurants and cafes, and delivering it to services that provide food for the homeless. That is a total of $6.12 million.

There has also been some infrastructure spending. The Wooloowin and Milton intersections in Brisbane will benefit from infrastructure investment program spending to the tune of about $1 million. They are very dangerous intersections, particularly the one in Wooloowin, which has been the scene of many accidents.

The Abbott government will be investing close to $50 billion in infrastructure across Australia over seven years to deliver vital transport infrastructure for the 21st century. In Queensland, we are investing $10.3 billion over 2013-14 to 2018-19, plus an additional $3.1 billion from 2019-20. Our investment includes $6.7 billion to fix the Bruce Highway over 10 years to 2022-23.

There has been an additional $200 million in Black Spot funding over the period 2015-16, and this will be very welcome. From this, Queensland will receive an additional $20.3 million in the 2015-16 year. It will also receive the same amount in the 2016-17 year.

It is a tough budget. Regrettably, every time the coalition comes to office after Labor has been in power there is a fiscal mess to clean up. I say this to the people of Brisbane: do not fall for the Labor lies. They deceived you when they were in office for six years and they are deceiving you again now. The facts are these: instead of being slashed to the bone, welfare spending continues to rise by 2.5 per cent annually in real terms until 2017-18. Far from the brutal and cruel cuts to schools that Bill Shorten has denounced, Commonwealth funding of government schools in 2018 will be 36 per cent higher in real terms than this year and more than double its level in 2003. And in the health area there will be real spending on hospitals, and the 2018-19 budget will be increased from 40 per cent to 50 per cent higher than it was in 2002-03. The pension supplement will also continue to be paid to eligible pensioners.

We need to have policy reform, and currently the cost of the age pension is projected to increase by 70 per cent over the next decade to almost $40 billion a year. We have to make sure that we have funding for pensions and other programs and, like all governments around the world, the coalition will continue to make sure that we are on a sustainable path. (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.

See this speech in context