Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

About the fact that they did not take it to an election. We have finished with it. But they did not take it to an election. They give us a gobful about not taking things to an election, about explicitly ruling it out. But I have a warning, especially to those guys who were not here in the last parliament. In the last parliament, as part of the deal making that went on, the member for Denison was able to get the then Prime Minister Gillard to agree to savage cuts in pokies and all the sort of stuff that went around that. The member for Shortland and the then member for Robertson and other people were taken to their local RSLs and sports clubs and so on, and they were belted. But the then member for Robertson stood up there and she stuck to the line. She did the right thing and she took her punishment well. I was talking to her one night and I said, 'The hard part about that is (a) it's state legislation and (b) you didn't take it to an election to do it.' She said, 'Oh, but it's so bad, Ewen. These people are killing themselves.' And then, when the then member for Fisher became the Speaker and they did not need Wilkie anymore, out it went, overnight. No-one was crossing the floor. It was no longer the greatest moral challenge of all time. They just did it.

So, when you go there, the changes to the age pension will not come in until after the next election. That gives the Labor Party enough time to come up with what they are going to do at the next election. That comes with enough time to sit down and say what they are going to do and how they are going to pay for it. That is the important thing here. We got brought in because they could not handle the chequebook. That is the reason we are on this side and they are on that side. It is not anything to do with social conscience. It is not anything to do with the budget or anything like that; it is because they cannot handle the money. We have to handle the money, and it is as simple as that. If we do not get this thing into order—if we do not ask people to do more for what they are getting—we will never get this thing back in line and we will turn into the archetypal Greece or Ireland because we are not getting it under control.

I have three children. I have a 21-year-old, my daughter is going to turn 20 at the end of this week and I have a 12-year-old. When I am old, grey and out of this place, I want to be able to say to them that I did my best, that we did not just pass it on to them to fix it up for us because we did not have enough ticker to actually front the thing. Previous parliaments have not addressed the basic structural issues around our budget. To the credit of the Treasure, the Minister for Finance and the Prime Minister, we have actually looked at this thing and said, 'If we don't pull this thing into order, we're in all sorts of strife.'

So we are asking for an awful lot of money out of these bills. It is $8.7 billion, and that is going to hurt some people, but what is the option? Tell me what the option is and how you are going to pay for it. Tell me how we get these things done, because at the end of the day we are still spending $146 billion this year in social security payments. Social security payments are 35 per cent of the budget. It cannot keep on going the way it is. So I say to those members opposite: get on board, let's be serious about this and let's fix this thing, because that is the business we are in. We are fixing it so the next people who get this vehicle can actually do something. Every cent you pay back in debt is money you cannot spend on stuff you want to do. I thank the House.

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