Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Given that this government inherited from the previous coalition government no net government debt, a reserve in the Future Fund of over $50 billion and a budget surplus of nearly $20 billion in the last financial year, will the Prime Minister now bring forward the coalition government tax cuts due to commence on 1 July next year?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We seem to get a policy a day from the opposition at the moment. I listened carefully to what the member for North Sydney said about what happened with the then government’s use of revenue streams from the resources boom starting back in 2001. I listened very carefully. Here we are in the year 2008 and we have infrastructure bottlenecks off coal ports in New South Wales and Queensland, we have a national road system which is clogged in our major cities and we have no action on urban congestion in terms of establishing a comprehensive urban rail network. We had virtually no action in laying out a national high-speed broadband network. You begin to ask yourself this question: what happened to the $390 billion beyond the parameters which Saul Eslake and others spoke about so much last year? He posed the simple question: name a single infrastructure item, a single item of productive investment in the future, to which you could attribute that beyond parameter growth in government revenues which the previous government benefited from through the resources boom. His answer was: none. What I would say to the opposition is: we stand proudly by our nation-building agenda. We intend to build the nation’s infrastructure; we intend to deploy the capital of the nation in building future economic growth. We will build the nation’s roads, build the nation’s ports, build the nation’s railways and build the nation’s high-speed broadband because it is in the long-term interests of this economy that we do so and it supports economic growth on the way through.