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

Once again we see the extraordinary hypocrisy of the Australian Labor Party. Once again we see the man who is meant to be the alternative Prime Minister of this country stand at the dispatch box and make comments about what he believes to be fair and unfair, and to slander those on this side of the chamber.

And for what purpose? For the single purpose that the Australian Labor Party is unwilling to confront the truth about their legacy. We on this side of the chamber understand Labor's legacy. We on this side of the chamber perhaps are more willing to be up-front with the Australian people about the challenges that we as a nation face. But not the Australian Labor Party. They want to bury their legacy underneath the carpet. They want to pretend that the problems that they bequeathed not only to this government but also to future generations of Australians do not exist and, in fact, possibly the person with the most invested in the betrayal of the Australian people is none other than the opposition leader.

That is why we see the Australian Labor Party stand up and rail about the unfairness of the budget. The fact is, there is no bigger unfairness on the national debate across the country right now than the unfairness of the Australian Labor Party, which says, 'We would rather leave to future generations of Australian children all the problems of paying back the multi-billion dollars of debt and deficit than we would face up to the reality .' We as a government are proud of this budget. We are proud of this budget because this budget actually does have the right priorities, because they are anchored around one central tenet. That central tenet is that we can only afford to do what we can afford to achieve in terms of our fiscal priorities. We can only undertake reforms if we can pay for them. We can only undertake policy spending if we can pay for it. We can only engage in new initiatives if there is a way to pay for them. And if there is no ability to raise the money necessary it is not appropriate to say that it is good enough to kick the can down the road. It is not appropriate to say to Australian children, 'We don't care what the impact is going to be on you; we're going to undertake this particular proposal because we think there are a few votes in it.' That is Labor's approach.

That is not the coalition approach. That is not our approach, and we will stand in this chamber each and every day and defend decisions that we know are not the most popular decisions. We did not undertake this budget reform process because we thought it was going to make us 55-45 in the polls. No. We undertook these decisions because these are decisions that are in the national interest. We undertook these decisions because these are decisions that are financially sustainable. We undertook these decisions because we know in the long term that the Australian people can see through the salesmanship of the Australian Labor Party—they can see through the falseness of the confected outrage that we see from Labor members opposite. And they fundamentally know this: that no promise from the Australian Labor Party is worth anything if they cannot afford to pay for it.

That is why as a government, to tackle the fact that we have an ageing population and to address the fact that we have a tax base that is getting smaller relative to the size of the population, we have said that one of our very top priorities must be investment in infrastructure. And the Prime Minister has made it clear that he wants to be remembered as an infrastructure Prime Minister—and he will be. He will be, because the government, together with the private sector and state government partners, will allocate $125 billion for productive infrastructure for this nation.

Compare the coalition's approach to infrastructure with that of the previous, Labor government. There has been $125 billion put into productive infrastructure across the nation, including the East-West Link, the Gateway duplication, the expansion on the northern side of the Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, and the freight route in Perth—a whole host of projects. Compare that to Labor's grand infrastructure projects. Perhaps none was more grand than Building the Education Revolution. Who could forget Labor's $16 billion Building the Education Revolution vision, which saw school halls and covered out-door learning centres rolled out across the country. Sure, there were a couple of examples where schools already had one and they did not want another one, but that did not matter because it got in the way of Labor's grand vision. Sure, there were a couple of examples where the Australian Labor Party, through their haste to roll out this program, where paying two or three times the going rate, but that did not matter; it was just taxpayers money! They did not need to worry about that!

We have seen the Australian Labor Party's approach with their $900 cash splash. Labor said, 'There's some wastage, sure, but don't worry about it; it's necessary.' But the fact is that it has been left to this generation and future generations to pay back all of that spending. And when Labor says that they are opposed to this government making reforms around, for example, pensions, they are actually saying, 'We will sacrifice future generations of Australians and make them pay that debt for decades in order to secure ourselves a couple of extra votes today.' That is Labor's central massage.

As a government we will not stand idly by, so I say to the Australian Labor Party, on behalf of the coalition, 'We will stare you down in every single debate, because there is one thing that we know about—and that is good fiscal governance.' We know that we do it better than Labor. And if you ever want an example of that, look no further than the facts. The Australian Labor Party is very big on rhetoric but very poor on actions. We know that they promised over 500 times to deliver a budget surplus. How many did they deliver?—not one.

We know that the former Treasurer in the Labor government, the member for Lilley, stood here at this very dispatch box, in 2012, and said, 'The four years of surplus I announce tonight…' only to deliver four more years of deficit. Labor's legacy is $123 billion of deficit and $667 billion of gross debt. And all of the huffing and puffing from the Leader of the Opposition and from Labor members opposite will never undo one fundamental fact: that that debt trajectory—the fastest growing level of spending in the 17 developed nations monitored by the IMF; the fastest growth rate of debt, basically, on the face of the planet—was Labor's legacy at a time when our terms of trade were among some of the best this nation has ever seen.

With the policies that Labor continues to espouse today, they would sacrifice the future by ensuring that we have another four years of budget deficits, which would mean that, as a nation, we have had 10 years of budget deficits—the longest single period of budget deficits in over 45 years, since budget records were kept in 1971. That is Labor's approach, and that is why, as a coalition government, we are committed to economic reform, productive infrastructure and to being upfront and frank with the Australian people in saying, 'We know that not everything we say is good news but—do you know what?—it is the truth.

We will always level with the Australian people and tell them what we can afford and what we cannot afford. And the only thing that Labor's shonky approach—the snake-oil-salesman approach that says, 'Don't worry about it; we'll kick the can down the road'—will bequeath is a situation where Australian kids are poorer tomorrow than they are today. It might be acceptable for the Australian Labor Party to say: 'We don't care about $25,000 of debt for every man, woman and child. We don't care that an Australian family of four will have a starting point of being $100,000 in debt thanks to Labor's policies.'

But in the coalition we do care, and we will not stand by and allow that failed Labor Party approach to continue. We saw the consequences of six years of Labor ineptitude when it comes to good governance. As a coalition government we may not always do what is popular but we will always do what is right. And in the fullness of time I would rather go to the electorate every day of every week and look the constituents in the eye and say to them, 'We make decisions because they're the right decisions in the national interests, and we prioritise the right kinds of spending, and not the cash splashes which might, in the short term, be a nice little sugar hit.' Those things might, in the short term garner a couple of extra votes for the Australian Labor Party but in the long term they will betray the single most important trust the Australian people put in us—the future of their children.

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