Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

If you believed anything of what you just heard then you would be of the view that there is some great real estate available in some of the shonkiest places on the planet because, quite frankly, what we just heard was a narrative from the Australian Labor Party that has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the truth. I noticed that the MPI today talks about how the budget 'will hurt Australian families into the future'. Of all the interest to use, how extraordinary that they would use the anchor of the future because the one inescapable fact about six years of the Australian Labor Party is that there is one thing Labor clearly cared naught for and that is the future because six years of Labor policy underscored an approach that was all about the now. If the Labor Party truly cared for the future, they would not have allowed a situation to arise where they racked up $300 billion debt and were forecast to reach $667 billion of debt. Do you know who pays all of that off? The next generation of Australians. It is the Aussie kids of today. It is the kids sitting up there in the public galleries who will be paying off that debt for the next 20 or 30 years. I know that when I went to Building the Education Revolution openings, which the Labor Party used to trumpet about—and I am sure that there were coalition members who went along to their local schools—and saw the puffed-up chests on Labor senators who were saying, saying, 'Look at this majestic vision we are delivering for you Aussie kids.' I used to say to them that I hoped they derived benefit from those school halls. Sure, they may have paid twice what they were worth. Sure, it may not have been something that the school community actually wanted, but I genuinely and sincerely hoped that the children that were assembled there in the school hall actually got benefit from it. The reason I wanted them to get benefit from it is because those same kids will be paying that school hall off for the next 20 or 30 years.

So we on this side of the House do not need to be lectured to about the future by the Australian Labor Party. We on this side of the House are the defenders of the future. We on this side of the House are the people that are standing up for the next generation of Australians that will be paying back Labor's debt for 20 or 30 years. That is the reason why as members of the coalition we will always stand steadfast about the fact that we want the next generation of Australians to inherit a country that is in a better position than what we were. Only the Australian Labor Party would have the hide, the hypocrisy, the audacity to be handed the reins of government with no net debt and actually $50 billion of savings, and then hand it back six years later with a forecast gross debt of $667 billion.

Only the Australian Labor Party would come into the chamber and talk about education and say that education has been cut under the coalition. The simple fact is that if you look at the actual forward estimates, if you look at education funding over the next four years, the coalition is putting $1.2 billion extra into education funding—$1.2 billion extra of education funding under the coalition. But if you were to listen to the contribution from the previous Labor member you would think that there was a cut. They stand there and they say it with sincerity. They stand at the dispatch box and they expect Australians to believe them. But there is no cut to education funding. Education funding in the budget papers, as a matter of fact, is going up by $1.2 billion. Members here on this side of the House from Queensland and from Western Australia know very well that those two states were going to have hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for education ripped out of them. That is what was in the budget papers.

So we do not need to be lectured to by the Australian Labor Party about the future, because we will deal with facts about extra funding for education. We will deal with facts about how the debt is going to be $300 billion less as a result of reforms that we are making. We know that we will leave a better Australia tomorrow for Aussie kids than the Labor Party did after six years.

See this speech in context