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

Did they take HECS to an election? No, they did not. They were faced with a set of circumstances. Now, I am not as smart as Andrew Leigh. I do not have any letters after my name. So, when I go into this thing, I have to look at what we are actually doing. I would have to bring everything back to what I did when I ran a business and what I do in my own home. When I was a little kid, when my mum burnt dinner we did not all pile into the car and go down the road to the hotel and get a countery, or go to a restaurant and get a high-flying meal. What we did in our house, because we had limited income, was have toast or baked beans or something like that. We made do with what we had because you just do not go and spend what you do not have. What we have to do as a government is understand that we have shrinking income and growing projections going into the future so if we do not adjust what we are doing, we will just keep on going forward.

I heard the member for Griffith during the MPI say that we have one of the lowest debt to GDP ratios in the OECD. That may very well be true but we also started with fairly low debt to GDP. We are a small population with debt. It goes back to my role as an auctioneer where I specialised in insolvency. It gets down to not so much debt to GDP ratio; it gets down to how much cash you have got and your ability to repay that loan. It does not take much before all the cash that you are supposed to have to run your business goes towards paying off your loans, and that is what sends businesses to the wall.

Too many times I have walked into good solid businesses where a manager or an owner of a business has lost control of their spending, has got into trouble either because debt was easy to obtain or because the interest rates were so incredibly high and has got into the situation where more and more of their working capital is going back to the bank. I do not think the business community, especially small businesses, are out there saying that they are on top of everything because I do not think that they are. What we have to do is get small businesses to say they will take a punt.

As the member for Griffith says, Queensland's unemployment is rising. In my city of Townsville, we have real trouble with youth unemployment. When an economy starts to contract or starts to hurt, it is the aged unemployment and the youth unemployment which gets hit first because a small business is not going to take a punt on someone who has no experience or on someone who may have bad habits. What they will do is get someone who is already in a job, who has a proven track record and they will poach them from somebody else. When a person is poached, they will not be replaced in the other firm. So what we have to do is instil that confidence for business people to take a punt on a young person or take a punt on an older person, to put them on and to have a real go at this job because that is how we produce income.

I said in my maiden speech what government must do is get their hands out of small business's pocket. Let them get on with their business and let them create wealth. In my city of Townsville, we have an opportunity where we can do a lot of things. We have an opportunity to back winners but government can only do so much. Government can set the scene but it is the small businesses that grow around that which produce the jobs and create the wealth. They are the ones that do that.

Tax is a nasty word but it is a part of our lives. We cannot survive as a nation without taxes. What we have to do is look at what we are doing here. We need to balance up what our income is and what our outgoings are, and both have to be adjusted. This bill goes some way to adjusting some of the things that the previous government had legislated but had not enacted. What we have to do is make sure that we start getting on with the business of clearing the decks and making sure that in small business, in big business and in any business that people have the opportunity to get a job. If more people are getting jobs then more people are paying tax, more people are consuming and away we go. I back the government with these things because sooner or later it has to be understood that we have to have a budget that balances.

I will go back to my starting point. I like the member for Fraser. He is a very clever man and he also gets it: a budget which balances is a budget which is healthy. We can talk about how we get there as much as we like but we agree on that basic principle. We can agree that governments have to adjust to a certain set of circumstances like the previous government did to the GFC. Those opposite did not take their response to the GFC to an election. What they saw was a set of circumstances change rapidly and they had to adjust to it. We backed them on the first set of stimulus. Governments must react to changing circumstances. That is what governments do. We cannot just keep going around these things. We have to balance the budget and this goes part of the way to doing it.

I cannot take my children every year to Disneyland. They have never been to Disneyland. Why? Because I cannot afford it. I do not want to disappoint my kids and they are disappointed that they cannot go. But at the end of the day, I can take them to Disneyland. I can be the world's best dad but we will be living in the street. I just had a quote done for an outdoor extension and a pergola at my house. It was worth more than my house. I would love to have it done but I would be over capitalising on the thing and I would be spending money I do not have. If we apply the same basic things to government then we are halfway there.

I think we try and complicate these things a little bit too much in this place. It just gets down to: we have to work hard and we have to balance the budget. I think both sides of this place agree with that. I agree with this bill. I agree with the general narrative of what we are doing. No-one wants to tax people more than we absolutely have to. But when you are in a hole and you are paying off debt, it does not come out of your gross income; it comes out of your net income. It comes out of your cash and all repayments hurt. The people who say there are 72 easy repayments are lying to you because all repayments hurt because they come out of your net income, not out of the the gross. I back the government on this and I thank the House.

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