Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the matter of public importance. We have had six years of the Labor experiment where the notion was that the bigger and busier a bureaucracy, the better this nation would be. Look where it left us. I know today has been somewhat of a battle between two sides of politics' talking points, but I think Australians really do get that where we were heading was simply unsustainable. They get that no matter how good the party was last night, and we do not quite know who was responsible, this side of politics is going to clean up the situation. It is not easy to do. There are tough decisions. It is quite easy to see individuals over on the Labor side of politics wandering around like roving complaints desk managers looking for anyone who has a grievance and trying to talk it up. They are like the ronin from medieval Japan, wandering around like lost samurai without masters hoping that someone has got a whinge. For six years that lot never saw a special interest they could not fund, but it has all come home to roost, hasn't it?

Let us be honest, in 2009 good people in Treasury said in MYEFO, when they relied on trim inputs which were overly reliant on US inputs, that there genuinely was the risk of a five per cent drop in our GDP. Of course that proved to be wrong. The mistake was not made in 2008 when Wayne Swan initiated the first one to two per cent of GDP stimulus. The mistake came in 2009 when the then Labor government was too embarrassed to admit that the new Treasury figures showed that there would be no recession whatsoever in Australia. Did they take the foot off the accelerator? No. That was the crime for which we now the pay the price as an Australian nation. That was the crime that leaves us looking at the weeping sore of unpaid debt that this nation somehow has to deal with. The debt of $667 billion, as articulately put by my neighbour here, is an enormous amount of money for which Labor opposite has never contemplated a solution.

We will address it systematically and methodically. It will not be easy and, yes, it means tightening belts. I am inspired when I talk to people in my electorate who say, 'You know what? I can see the situation we are in. You are talking to me straight and together we will get out of this mess.' It starts by deregulating education to have the finest universities in the world right here. It starts by everyone who can pay a co-payment doing just that in our health system. I know that general practitioners will always bulk bill even under these new arrangements people who cannot afford to pay. I note that the sick will always have access to a chronic disease management plan which attracts no co-payment whatsoever, nor do pregnancy visits and nor do follow-ups and reviews. You can have your health looked after with a chronic disease under those 97 items that do not attract any co-payment whatsoever.

What are we replacing? We are replacing an opposition that talks about their commitment to industry and to innovation and that now questions our $3.03 billion investment into CSIRO or our investment into ANSTO of $777 million and $508 million for Geoscience Australia. These are significant investments and yet this mob tried to launch the RB investigator but allocated no money to run it or staff it. This is the ingenious kind of management by press release that Australians are so glad to see the back of.

I have given a bit of historical context, but I also want to talk about the future. This week the Bank of England is looking at raising its interest rates. The US is looking at a 200-basis-point increase in interest rates over the next two years, and this is a significant issue for Australia. With 2.9 per cent inflation right now, the Reserve Bank would be quite within its rights to raise interest rates, but they do not because of the arbitrage impacts of the US not doing so. When the US does, and I think it is more likely than not, we are then faced with the predicament of who funds all of the bonds that attracted the money here to pay off the debt. The government pays the interest. And what happens to that interest rate? It goes up. When we start paying off that interest to foreign bond holders who expect that return on investment, you will see an even greater challenge for paying off the debt than we already face. Of course, it was way beyond the previous Treasurer and previous government, but we appreciate that this will be a significant challenge and we are the only side of politics that will ever deal with it. It reminds you a bit of the neighbour who comes over to borrow the mower, but the mower never comes back the same as when you lent it. That is exactly how it is when we look after the economy—it was in good, safe hands only to have it run down and destroyed by a pack that says, 'You know what? We've got no ideas left.' We appreciate you have no ideas left; we love the way you grab the lectern and talk about Gas Bill Shorten's talking points for a few minutes in this MPI—

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