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

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Budget Repair) Bill 2015. 'Budget repair' are the key words of this bill, because we do have a budget that is in desperate need of repair. I should not have to remind the House that we are now coming into the ninth year in a row of budget deficits.

Starting off we note that the last budget the previous coalition government handed down, under the management of John Howard and Peter Costello, had a $20 billion surplus. And then, in 2008-09, the Labor Party took over and they started off with a $27 billion deficit. In 2009-10, the supposedly temporary budget deficit was $54 billion. In 2010-11, there was another $47 billion deficit, and they followed that in 2011-12 with another $43 billion deficit. In 2012-13, with a little bit of tricky financial accounting and shifting some expenditures to the year before or the year after and pulling revenue from the year before or the year after back in, they were able to get it down to $19 billion, but we saw the trickery of that. In 2014, there was a $48 billion deficit, and last financial year, 2014-15, there was $38 billion. This year we are projecting a $37 billion deficit, and the following year we are predicting $34 billion.

So, even if all these budget measures go through, in the next coming financial year, we will still be, as a nation, borrowing close to $100 million every day and we will have been doing that for almost the last 10 years. That means that every single day of the year governments have had to pay the expenses and accounts. They have had to borrow $100 million every single day, and that builds up a debt, a higher taxation obligation and a lesser ability to enjoy social services for our kids and our grandkids.

Already this year the interest payment on the debt we have is something like $14 billion. What that means is that we, as the government, have to collect $14 billion from the taxes of the hardworking people of Australia not to pay back the debt but just to service the interest alone. If you break that down, that works out at about $35 million every single day. My speaking time on this bill is 15 minutes, and in that 15 minutes this nation will have had to pay $300,000 in interest on that debt. This cannot continue, and thankfully there is a former Labor Prime Minister that I would hope all Labor members of parliament would listen to, one Paul Keating. I quote him from The Australiantoday:

The real point is the rest of the world has trimmed us down, commodity prices have fallen … and of course with (lower) wages growth, in the budget revenues are falling.

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

Sadly, on the other side of this chamber the penny has not dropped, because they are still out there telling the Australian public that governments can keep on spending, keep on borrowing and keep on putting more debt onto our children and our grandchildren, making a less prosperous lifestyle for Australians, because they simply want to be electorally popular. Sometimes in this parliament hard decisions need to be made. Those decisions may not be popular, but they must be made for the betterment of our country. Paul Keating continued, saying:

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

We owe it to our kids to do so. Keating goes on:

(Then ministers) Peter Walsh, John Dawkins and myself sat in those expenditure review committees 10 weeks a year, 10 hours a day.

In the end I was sitting up at the desk with a tennis shade on and sunglasses because I couldn’t stand the light from the paper, sitting there for so long.

That was the former Labor government. Labor Prime Ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke knew that they could not continue on spending the way they were, and even then they were still unable to bring the budget back into balance. And yet we have had speaker after speaker from the Labor side completely ignoring the facts of the budget problem we have—

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