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

We just hear it now in an interjection at the table. The extraordinary thing is that around $5 billion of the savings that have been proposed are actually Labor Party savings. And one of those savings measures, worth around $1.1 billion, is changes to research and development tax incentives. The coalition adopted this saving that was announced by Labor. The saving effectively works to exclude companies with turnovers of $20 billion or more. And what is Labor doing? Labor is actually fighting, in the chamber up there, to make sure that that incentive stays in place for some of the biggest companies in the world. If you ever wanted a clearer example of hypocrisy it is the Labor Party going in to bat for that. The Labor Party will wear the crushing weight of hypocrisy for saying they are standing up for the Aussie battler when in actuality they are fighting to maintain a $1.1 billion savings measure in the interests of some of the biggest companies not only in this nation but globally.

In addition, the Labor Party's approach is, 'We don't care about the fact that we are sentencing future generations of Australians to decades of debt and deficit.' Apparently it is equitable to pay for spending today by ripping money off future generations of Australians. Only the coalition has put forward a clear plan to make sure that we live within our means. And only the coalition has put forward a budget that requires all strata of society to make their contributions.

And it simply is not good enough for the Australian Labor Party to say, 'There is no crisis. There's nothing to worry about. There's no problem here.' I notice that the shadow Treasurer is in the chamber. This is the man who presided over the complete debacle of Australia's border protection laws. At the time, the shadow Treasurer made the comment, 'There's no crisis here.' Sure, there were 50,000 people, 750 boats, and over a thousand people who perished at sea, but apparently there was no crisis.

We have heard the shadow Treasurer saying, now, 'There's no problem with expenditure. There's no problem with revenue. There's no need to have any of these savings.' It was the shadow Treasurer who argued, after announcing some $5 billion of savings, 'We want to keep those savings; we're not prepared to stand by our own policies.' This just underscores what rank populists and opportunists the Australian Labor Party are. On that basis, I think the Australian people will continue to mark down the Australian Labor Party.

Labor does not need to be in a situation where they have dealt themselves out of the game. Labor will have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are prepared to step up and take decisions in the national interest. Frankly, it beggars belief that the Australian Labor Party would be willing to incur tens of billions of dollars of additional debt and would be willing to incur a gross debt peak that is some $667 billion—money which they know this nation cannot afford to spend. Yet the Australian Labor Party are willing to borrow that money because they believe it is in their short-term political interest.

So when the Australian Labor Party say that they care about working families, and when they say, 'We've got to take care of the environment for the next generation,' why do they exclude any concern about the next generation starting out with $25,000 worth of debt for every man, woman and child? The rank hypocrisy of Labor being concerned, apparently, about the next generation of Australians is just so clear. Labor are willing to sentence Australian children to paying for their debt which has resulted from the spending that they think will get them a couple of extra votes.

On behalf of the next generation of Australians, we will stand in Labor's way. The coalition will stand in Labor's way because we are not prepared to shackle generation after generation to more debt and deficit to enable Labor to claim to be all about largesse and being equitable and fair. There is nothing fair about sentencing Aussie kids to decades of debt. There is nothing fair about running six, seven or eight years of record deficits.

There is nothing fair about saying to people, 'There is no need for there to be any change.' It requires maturity. It requires the adults in the room to look the Australian people in the eye and say, 'We recognise that everything we announced isn't universally popular, but—you know what?—we are not doing it to be the most popular people in town. We are doing it because it is the right thing to do.'

That is something that the Australian Labor Party has always taken great lengths to avoid. The Australian Labor Party will not do the right thing. The Australian Labor Party will not take decisions in the national interest. The Australian Labor Party will always take the easiest, laziest path if they believe there are a couple of votes in it. Well, thankfully, there are others in the Senate that a more prepared to govern in the national interest.

I say to the Australian Labor Party that in the short term if there is something they want to do they need to start to put their political interests second and the national interests first. They could start, very simply, by backing their own announced savings. If the Labor Party did that there would be a brighter tomorrow—a brighter future when it comes to the sustainability and long-term finances of this nation.

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