Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, I am pleased to speak in continuation and I thank you for taking the chair. The key words in the title of this legislation are 'budget repair'. As I was saying before question time, we are in desperate need in this country to repair the budget. Since Labor took office back in 2007, we have seen this country continue to borrow $100 million, on average, every single day of the year. What that means is that we are borrowing to sustain government expenditure. We love to teach the concept of sustainability in schools, but borrowing $100 million per day is simply unsustainable. When I listen to contributions from the members of the Labor Party, I know they do not understand what this actually means and the damage that they are doing to this nation by continuing to block measures of budget repair.

What happens when the budget is in deficit is that we fund it by writing out an IOU. We simply sell government bonds, which is no different to writing on a piece of paper 'I owe you'. We sell those government bonds. That money then comes into the federal Treasury and that is what we use to pay our way. But those government bonds have an interest component that we must pay. This year it is close to $14 billion that we have to find from the taxpayers of this nation just to pay the interest. As I said before, that works out, in this 15-minute contribution, close to $300,000 that has to be taken from the hardworking Australians out there just to pay the interest on government debt. That goes on every 15 minutes of the day, every day of the week, every week of the month and every month of the year, until we start paying down that government debt. Yet we cannot even bring the budget back to surplus, even if, on the figures that I have quoted, we had some cooperation from the Labor Party and the Greens to get these modest cuts through and heading us back in a trajectory to get that budget back in balance.

The Treasurer, my good colleague, the member for Cook, noted during question time the comments of the former Treasurer, Paul Keating. It is very rare that I would come into this chamber and quote Keating, and say that the members of the opposition should listen to him, but I hope today they have. I quote him from this morning's radio on 2GB. He talked about how we cannot continue to borrow money we do not have. He said:

The Treasurer—

referring to the member for Cook—

has got to sit down and go through, line by line, every item of social expenditure—indeed every item of expenditure …

That is what we are doing in this bill.

Keating also said:

When Commonwealth revenue has been so affected, the penny ought to drop that what we should be doing is cutting spending.

I would hope that some time very soon the penny drops for those members of the opposition and they realise that they cannot come in here and whinge, whine and moan about this government trying to do the right thing for this nation by cutting expenditure. It is not an easy task to take something away. To cut expenditure is a hard job. It is unpopular but it is a job that must be done for the future of our nation. And it does this opposition no credit—in fact, it is disgraceful—that they come in and whinge, carp and whine about every cent of revenue that we try to save so that we can avoid borrowing that money from overseas.

That is what we are doing. Most of the money we are borrowing to finance our ongoing expenditure comes from sources overseas. Those who like to talk up the republic think Australia should have more control of its nation, yet at the same time they are getting us deeper into debt to foreigners. We cannot continue this way, and that is why the very modest measures in this bill should be supported.

My other close neighbour, the member for Fowler, talked about the Vietnamese community—a wonderful community that makes up part of my electorate, and how they would be unfairly affected by this. I would just like to go through what the provisions will be after this bill is in place. Pensions will still be portable. That means: if you qualify for the aged pension, you can travel offshore, go on holidays, visit relatives or go on a trip and your pension will go with you. You will be paid the full Australian pension for six weeks without any questions asked. After six weeks, there is a slight reduction, depending on how many years you have been a resident in Australia. So anyone that migrated from Vietnam in 1981 or before gets the full Australian pension, portable and paid into Vietnam for as long as they like.

To put that in some context: the current average monthly wage in Vietnam is US$145 in Hanoi and US$148 in Ho Chi Minh City. That is the equivalent of $100 per fortnight. Yet an Australian citizen that goes to live in Vietnam is entitled to get the Australian pension in full, which is $800 per fortnight. They are able to get eight times the average wage, all paid for by the Australian taxpayer. We talk about fairness and sustainability, and I would like this House to think about someone that is on $80,000. For every extra dollar they earn, they are taxed—now under the current provisions—close to 40c in the dollar. Yet someone in Singapore that earns the equivalent of $80,000 pays only 11.5c in tax for every extra dollar that they earn. So that 40c in tax simply becomes a disincentive for people to work.

The other thing we have seen this week here in parliament is how completely illiterate and dangerous the opposition would be, should they ever get back to the Treasury benches. We had the member for Watson claiming that the way he was going to fund all this great new expenditure from Labor was by taxing smokers. Now, I would like to see smoking rates come down and I would like to see no smoking in Australia. However, the member for Watson claimed that Labor's policies would raise $47 billion in taxes. There are only 2.5 million smokers in Australia, so if we assume that there are no further reductions whatsoever, that works out at $8,800 per smoker. That is what the Labor Party proposes. If you are a smoker, the Labor Party wants to increase the taxes you pay on your cigarettes by $8,800—and these people are the lowest-income earners in the country. Where are they going to get $8,800 from? This shows us a plain example of why those that sit on the other side are completely unfit to ever occupy the Treasury benches of this country.

Debate adjourned.

See this speech in context