Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to say to the member for O'Connor that if we can get the member for Riverina over there to do the fencing I will welcome him at Buckleboo.

I do not support the amendment. Bill Clinton famously had a sign displayed in his electoral office before his election to the presidency of the US in 1993: 'It's the Economy Stupid.' And so it was, and so it remains. It is the economy. Because very little can be fixed without money. The less anyone has, the less they care about everything else. Take the environment for instance. If you cannot feed your family, the environment comes last. The industrialised nations of the world, those that have money in their pocket, are the greatest friends of the environment. Those that have nothing can care little for the environment, because the pressing issues of today take precedence

Making sure Australia has a viable and wealthy future is in so many way determined by what we do today. If we leave a legacy to our children and their children that promotes the best of what this country can afford to its residents, we will have done well. But I underline: 'the best of what this country can afford'.

If, by comparison, we live beyond our means like the prodigal son or, even worse, like the grasshopper in the ancient Greek story from Aesop that delivers the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper: the grasshopper played away all summer and the ant stored for the winter. If we are like the grasshopper our future may be fine, but our children and our grandchildren may face an increasingly bleak and difficult future. No lesser an authority than the Bible tells us that 'the sins of the fathers will be revisited upon the children,' and nowhere can this be more apparent than this generation leaving mountains of debt for the next. Because not only does high debt inevitably lead to higher taxes, with the same certainty it will deliver lower services. So our inability to pay our way at the moment is impacting on our descendants in a very real way. I suspect that while some deny it, in their heart of hearts every member of this chamber and this parliament knows that.

For all their terrible faults as a government, the previous Labor government knew it too, or at least they said they did. Kevin Rudd, after all, promised the nation that the Labor Party believed in surpluses and would operate in surplus on average, through the economic cycle. One would wonder how long that cycle might be, with current performance. And it was the former Treasurer, the member for Lilley, Wayne Swan, who repeatedly told the nation that returning to surplus was imperative. In fact, in his budget speech in 2011 he said:

Meandering back to surplus would compound the pressure in our economy and push up the cost of living for pensioners and working people.

He was right, and he kept telling us how important it was and how he had made it happen. With the emphasis, once again, on 'had'. In fact, in the 2010-11 budget he told us that:

The strategy will see the budget return to surplus three years ahead of schedule and ahead of every other major advanced economy.

In 2011, he told us:

We are on track from surplus on 2012-13, on time, as promised.

In 2012, he told us:

The four years of surpluses I announce tonight are a powerful endorsement of the strength of our economy, resilience of our people and success of our policies.

In his last budget, the member for Lilley said:

Speaker, tonight, we put in place the savings to fully fund these priority investments—

Gonski and NDIS—

for 10 years and beyond, an achievement unprecedented in our nation's history.

That is the best bit: 'Tonight we put in place savings to fully fund these priority investments,' and 'an achievement unprecedented in our nation's history'. The words 'put in place' would indicate to me that this was a past event, that these savings had been put in place, that they had been legislated. Of course, they had not.

What would have broken historical trends is if the Treasurer of that time, the member for Lilley now, had delivered on what he had promised. That government was either too weak or too incompetent to do so. He and the Labor government did not legislate their own savings. Not to be denied, they sought a mandate at the election. They took the policy to the election and, as part of that existing bottom line, as incoming governments do, so did we. We picked up their budget, and that is our starting base. The Labor Party lost the election and with that they lost the zeal for any move that might lose them one vote. They lost their way and their appetite to deliver on savings that they had championed. They lost their solemn commitment to the Australian public to return the budget to surplus, not that the $6.5 billion in question would do that but it would most certainly help.

What a pathetic mob. Never has there been a mob so desperately lacking in intestinal fortitude. When asked on the ABC's AM program, by Chris Uhlmann—and this has been quoted extensively by my colleagues—why the Labor Party had backed away from its own savings, the opposition leader Bill Shorten said: 'Well, Chris, we're the Labor Party.' That sums it up. What Labor Party is that? It is certainly not the old Labor Party of Hawke, Keating and Walsh. It is the new Labor Party of Rudd, Gillard and Shorten. It is that Labor Party: all for themselves and stuff Australia.

They opposed the $2.8 billion saving delivered by not pressing ahead with the increase in the tax-free threshold, by layering the marginal tax rate, with direct implications on low-income tax offsets—which the Labor Party championed when they spoke of achieving surpluses and their importance. Now they are abandoned. They opposed the modest changes to the HECS. They now want the coalition government to borrow even more money to mortgage Australia's future for short-term political popularity with their support base. Shame on them for walking away from their own proposal, for taking their bat and ball and going home. It would be funny if it were not so tragic or adding to the intractable issues facing this country.

The coalition has been working hard to try to bring the budget back into balance since it was elected. It is not easy. They are hard decisions. Almost no-one in the whole of the parliament is willing to accept there is a problem, apart from the coalition. From the Labor Party, what do we get? Straight obstructionism. I cannot understand why opposition leader Bill Shorten will not let us get on with the job. It is beyond me. Surely, he hopes to win the next election and, surely, he wants the books to be in the best possible position when they come to that election and, surely, the savings that he puts forward before the election—let us take the political heat but surely he wants those in place, so those books are in better shape if and when he is to lead this country.

While the Treasurer and the government have signed three new FTAs to enable our service providers, agriculture and manufacturing sectors to get to the markets they need to grow, while the coalition has removed $2 billion worth of red tape and 57,000 pages of legislation that were choking productivity, while the coalition makes tough decisions to sell Medibank, while it wears the political pain of freezing indexation on a range of services and lifting the freeze on fuel excise, the Labor Party cannot even support its own savings. To the Labor Party, I say: thanks for nothing.

The government has signed off on $1 trillion worth of environmental approvals, abolished 76 wasteful authorities and boards and reinstated employee share schemes. We are doing our utmost to fix the budget and stop mortgaging our kids' futures. For the record, Labor opposes savings which will climb to $110 billion over the next decade.

The new head of Treasury, Mr John Fraser, said in February that Australia did not yet have a budget crisis but it faced economic problems that would become harder to fix the longer they were left unresolved. He said:

Our net commonwealth government debt is rising to high levels when the average cost of servicing that debt is less than 3 per cent per annum … If we don't start trying to turn around the rise in the quantum of debt, we leave ourselves very vulnerable to what will be the inevitable increase in interest rates somewhere down the track.

He went on to say:

More and more of our outlays will be going on government debt interest, paying the holders of government bonds, rather than being directed to more noble objectives.

So there we have it—from the head of Treasury—but the Labor Party denies there is even a problem. More importantly, on a moral basis, they deny their central part in creating that problem in the first place.

Once they had their hands on the levers of the economy, once they had an excuse to spend money because of the GFC, they just could not pull back on the hand break. They were able to give money to every group that had ever tapped them on the shoulder and said, 'You can help us when you're in government,' and they just kept helping. Except they were not helping. All they have done is create a huge problem for future generations to deal with. This government knows the problem and, I suspect, some—not many—in the Labor Party do too, but it seems there are not enough of them.

It is worth reflecting on what Joe Hockey and the Abbott government have been able to do to address the problems. I have detailed some of the tough decisions but there has been so much that is positive as well. The abolition of the ineffective and incredibly expensive carbon tax has been a windfall not just for household consumers but also for our businesses, the employers in our economy. The compliance cost accompanying the tax that raised no money—the mining tax; an interesting tax, that one—is gone. The budget delivers huge incentives for small businesses. These decisions have been met with great enthusiasm by the business community. We cannot fix the budget by just cutting outlays or by just curtailing expenditure growth alone. We also need to grow the economy and to facilitate the creation of new jobs. The budget delivers extra incentives for our very efficient and world-class agricultural industries, one of the very bright spots in our economic future.

The government has embarked on the biggest infrastructure spend ever, not because we have money to throw around but because we know that if it is well spent—as opposed to things like the home insulation scheme or the school halls scheme—then it will pump up the economy. I opened with a little bit about Bill Clinton and the notice in his office. In closing, I quote a song title to the Labor Party from that masterful musician of the twentieth century, John Lennon. He said: 'How do you sleep?'

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