Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On this matter of public importance it is really hard to know where to start. Regrettably, there is an inexhaustible reservoir of Labor incompetence and mismanagement to draw from. The opposition is in no position to lecture the government on budgetary management and policy failures. The whole premise of this MPI is the equivalent of taking marital advice from Hugh Hefner. Some of the outlandish claims in the last six years have included promising a surplus in 2012-13 on no less than 500 occasions and they delivered not a single surplus, not one. Labor's incompetency allowed gross debt to rise to $667 billion.

Nothing could better highlight the difference between the government and the opposition than this. We are responsible for the tough but fair fix; Labor is responsible for the problems. Labor left a budget position that will not return to surplus within the next decade unless urgent remedial action is taken. No-one ever said it was going to be easy to fix Labor's debt and deficit disaster.

Some staggering examples of non-existent service delivery from the Labor Party include these: those wonderful GP superclinics in cow paddocks! When in government Labor promised 64 superclinics and only delivered a measly 33. A local example was the Redcliffe Superclinic. It was built seven years after it was promised at a staggering cost of $15 million. Imagine the medical services that that could have provided—the hundreds of mammograms and the hundreds of doctors services that could have been provided.

There were the non-existent child care centres. Labor promised 260 child care centres when in government and delivered only 38, a shortfall of 222 centres. That is a delivery rate of just over 14 per cent said—a pathetic result even by Labor's standards. That is 222 communities across Australia that do not have a child care centre as a result of Labor's broken promises.

Labor made a mess of just about everything they touched. A typical example is Labor's regional development grant mess. And Auditor-General's report has revealed that the Rudd-Gillett-Rudd Labor government went out of its way to abuse taxpayers' money under the regional development grants. Today we have heard that of the 42 grant recommendations, Labor overturned 34 of those recommendations.

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