Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting to take the very first question from the member for Rankin, who in a previous life was chief of staff to none other than the former Treasurer and member for Lilley. The member for Rankin would know that under the six sorry years of Labor from 2007 to 2013 we experienced six of the worst budget deficits in our nation's long history. And what we inherited from those opposite were cumulative deficits as far as the eye could see—$123 billion—that is, debts which if left unchecked were going out and potentially reaching $667 billion and, of course, interest that we had to pay back amounting to many millions of dollars a day—interest that we had to pay back to overseas countries.

We have had to keep that in check. We have had to take measures—and drastic measures: last year's budget, I acknowledge, was necessarily tough. This year's budget, however, has an infrastructure program which is the largest in this nation's history. It has a small business package which is going to reinvigorate the confidence which was so sorely lacking when Labor were on the government benches. Small-business people tell me that they are now confident to be able to hire staff. They now have the confidence that they did not have from 2007 to 2013. And when we took over in September 2013, it was not the Liberal-National government but the taxpayers of the nation; the small businesses, the families, the farmers—they were the ones saddled with Labor's legacy of debt and deficit. They were the ones who were going to have to pay back this debt. And it was not just them, it was their children, and their children's children—and had we not been elected in 2013, goodness knows how far that debt was going to go out.

We are getting on with the job—the very difficult job—of fixing up Labor's mess. That is what good coalition governments do. That is what the Howard government did when it was elected in 1996—and what was Labor left with when they resumed government in 2007? They were left with a bank balance which read: black. They were left with a bank balance; they were left with reserve funds to be able to avoid those headwinds of the global financial crisis. And look, I recognise and I acknowledge that the GFC had an impact on Australia's bottom line. But without the shrewd financial stewardship of John Howard, and a succession of National Party leaders, as well as Peter Costello as Treasurer, we would have been in a far more parlous situation than we were. As a consequence, we were able to cushion the blow of the GFC and to get on with the job of governing Australia.

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