Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise here to support the minister in this appropriation deliberation. I bring to everyone's attention the fact that, once again, we have inherited a Labor mess. Whether it be at a federal level or in my home state of Queensland, where the LNP inherited an $89 billion debt which was incurred by an outgoing Labor government, it is an atrocious record that we, as a coalition, inherit.

In the national debate, as in the debate we have in Queensland, you will often find the critics on the other side of the House offer no solutions as to how they would cut spending or, if they will not cut spending, what increases in tax they would burden the Australian public with. There is nothing of that magnitude; nothing of that noise. However, what we will hear is rhetoric and I rise to allay the Australian public's concerns when they hear misleading statements espoused by those from the ALP saying that there have been cuts to education when the reality is that in this budget, education spending will increase.

In Queensland, health spending will increase. Labor uses the opportunity to go into the outward years and say that is where the cuts will be. To understand their capacity to budget and forecast, you could go back and have a look at their track record in forecasting surpluses and deficits. I remind the House that the Labor government was, on average, out by $20 billion. It was not out by a million dollars; it was not out by $20 million; it was not out by $100 million. It was out by $1,000 million dollars multiplied by 20. They were continually out with their forward estimates, so it is a little bit of a long straw to be reaching out into the outward years to try to draw some soft analogy that we are cutting into health and education.

I say to the aged pensioners of Australia that there are absolutely no cuts. There will be two increases per year at the current rate of indexation and it is only after the out years, into 2017, when we will implement the lesser of the indexations.

We have to be the adults in the room. We have to come to this budget—to return to some type of normality—because, speaking as a businessman and as a representative of the people in my electorate, everyone knows what happens if you spend more money than you earn. Everyone knows what that situation looks like; everyone knows where you end up. The banks understand exactly where you end up. We should not drift too far away from those basic fundamentals that we apply in our own households and businesses, but Labor seem to distance themselves from that soft logic. We cannot sustain $1 billion of interest per month on borrowed money to service our debt. That is unsustainable. On the contrary, since we have come to office, we have put an extra 100,000 jobs on. You would hear from the other side of the House that we were the doom-and-gloom party, that everyone was going to lose their job. It is quite the contrary with 100,000 new jobs.

Labor's record of deficit and debt had us on a trajectory of no less than $667 billion dollars of debt. No-one will forget Labor's management of the fiscal economy when they wanted to introduce a mining tax—a mining tax that raised three per cent of its forecast revenue—and then went and spent the money they thought they were going to generate from it, leaving us in a terrible situation. They talk about trying to offer the Australian public some relief from the carbon tax. The instant relief in this budget would be for the ALP to go into the Senate and repeal the carbon tax.

My question to the minister is—

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