Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Going through the budget papers, there are some things that jump off the page and concern you. I am looking through 'Liabilities and assets included in net debt', and this year it's $935 billion. Next year we're over $1 trillion. Then we're up to basically $1.1 trillion, and then we start heading towards $1.2 trillion. By 2029, we're up to $1.239 trillion in gross debt. This is a huge problem, and any person who has run a business will tell you that an escalating debt like that comes with massive servicing costs. Running through our servicing costs, I've noted that we're going from $25 billion and then jump up next year to $29½ billion. Then in the year after that it will be over $34 billion. We're ending up with close to $43 billion in the financial year ending 30 June 2029.

At the moment, we spend roughly $50 billion on defence. We are now basically taking the money that we should be using to defend our nation and using it instead to service our debt. We've done this to ourselves. About 50 per cent of your placements, of what are called non-resident holdings of Australian government securities, are foreign.

So we've got ourselves into a real pickle here, and there is nothing in these budget papers that talk to how on earth we pay this off. You can't just blindly go. I've been here 20 years now. I've never seen a forward projection work yet, to be quite frank—not usually within a bull's roar of it—but you can talk about your debt here and now. If you go to AOFM, if ever you are curious, you'll see 'Australian government securities outstanding'. It's on the front as you go in there. To try to manufacture some process of strengthening our balance sheet in such a form as to have a hope of just holding the debt where it is, we'd have to see in these budget papers some substantive, prudent investment in proper assets—not chattels, but proper assets that provide a determined return. I'll give you the names of some of those assets that we have tried in the past to get going but that have stalled. I'm going to hope that they've not stopped but have stalled.

The Inland Rail is one such asset. No matter where you go in the world, intermodal fast-track freight rail makes your economy stronger. It builds your economy's base. But this one's just stalled. It's gone nowhere.

You need water infrastructure. You need dams. Dams are the essence—the substance—of what generates wealth. If you don't believe that, find me a country that goes without water—how are they going? Go down to any river system and see what happens if they can't use water. It just withers. We don't have any vision of dams; we don't have any visions of rail.

In this nation, we've still only got two sealed roads from east to west—one through Camooweal and one across the Nullarbor. I hate to point it out to you, but have a look at them on a map, and you'll notice that they're very close to the coast. If we have a strategic issue that comes into play, we're not going to have much luck with roads on the coast, and—might I remind people—the Chinese were doing live-fire exercises off Sydney—

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