Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You don't want the facts recorded? No? Alright. Well, it's there for anyone to google. The facts are: every Australian is paying $4,500 more tax under the Morrison government than they were under Labor, and every household is paying $9,600 more than they were under Labor. They're the facts.

We could have a look at debt, though. That's a good one, isn't it? What do the facts say about that? Well, it's a little bit awkward for the government; I'll give you a heads-up. These economic geniuses are racking up a trillion dollars of debt; a trillion dollars, with almost nothing to show for it—no legacy; no real investment in infrastructure, just announced things; no investment in skills; they're just trying to repair the cuts they made to TAFE in their first six years. There's no social housing to show for it, just a whole lot of money to the private sector to push up housing prices, push up building costs and randomly renovate people's bathrooms—that's the truth of it. Tens of billions of dollars they've wasted, unnecessarily. We'll never cop a lecture on fiscal responsibility from this mob ever again. Twenty billion dollars of JobKeeper was rorted—paid to businesses to increase their profits and pay themselves executive bonuses. The former head of the Council of Small Business Organisations described it as close to theft. It was a rip-off. They ripped off taxpayers' money and shovelled it out the door. You could see big business, couldn't you? They'd be backing their trucks up to the Treasury in the dead of night. As the giant ATM funnels out the cash, they'd be shovelling it into the back of the truck, thinking: 'Who's stupid enough to give us this money to increase our profits? Oh, that would be the Morrison government. Free money! Off we drive.' They wasted $20 billion, and the next generation of Australians and the generation after them are going to be asked to repay this Liberal debt.

They wasted economic supports during lockdowns. Billions were paid to individuals and businesses that they would not have to have paid if they had ordered enough vaccines and built quarantine facilities. We're an island continent. They didn't build quarantine facilities; they didn't keep the disease out until people were vaccinated. Then they were last in the developed world on the vaccination rollout—the slowest. If they had even been average, we would have avoided months of these lockdowns. We would have been living with the virus more safely months ago, and they wouldn't have had to pay billions of dollars. But just shove that on the debt for the next generation!

There's the rorts, the waste and the corruption—shovelling taxpayers' money to marginal seats as if it were the Liberal Party's own. In my electorate, the most disadvantaged in Melbourne, we could do with a little bit of help. We didn't get a dollar of election commitments at the last election. I think you, Deputy Speaker Zimmerman, got a lovely regional pool in the electorate of North Sydney—that's famous. The list could go on. There's privatisation, as I said, wasting money, with billions of dollars paid to consultants and their contractor mates. No problem—just load it on the debt!

What's Morrison's response? He says, 'It's a one-in-100-year pandemic; don't blame me.' Here's an inconvenient fact: half of the Liberal debt was before COVID. This mob, the geniuses over there, doubled Australia's debt before COVID. From 2012 to 2019, Australia had the greatest debt growth of any developed nation in the world, out of all 36 OECD countries. I seek leave to table this graph, which shows the truth about the Liberal debt. See this? There are some nice, small red Labor lines, and then—ooh!— six years of more than double the debt, even before COVID. I seek leave to table this to tell you the truth about Liberal debt.

Leave not granted.

Another cover-up! Let's try again. I seek leave to table this graph, which shows that your government, the Liberal Morrison government, grew debt before COVID faster than any developed country in the world. It exposes the lies that you perpetuate day after day about debt.

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