Susan Lamb (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today in opposition, standing against the party of economic mismanagement. It's the very party that cried foul when Labor sensibly utilised the budget to keep Australia out of a recession. You will remember the cry: it was an economic disaster and a budget emergency, despite countless international economists praising Labor's very, very fine treatment of a global crisis. Many economists agreed that the quite small debt that was accrued was nothing to be scared of. It was totally justifiable under the circumstances that were presented, and here we are, just a few years later, and the debt has done nothing but balloon under this government. You won't hear anything about that. They are very, very silent on the ballooning debt. Where is the budget emergency now? Where is the budget emergency that we heard so much about?

I'm starting to think that the reason that colour printers are so hard to come by in Parliament House is to hide how much red there would be on the government's balance sheet. I don't know about you, but I don't have a colour printer in my office and I think that's probably why. So here we are today with the government's legacy: an exorbitant national debt. It's set to get bigger with the government's unfunded big-business tax cut—$65 billion bigger. That is not chump change, Deputy Speaker Howarth. I know you know that. You know that the people in your electorate and my electorate could do a lot with $65 billion.

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