Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition government has the capacity and determination to take Australia into a better future. We will provide a better deal for all of Australia, and in particular a better deal for my home state of Western Australia.

We will end the debt and deficit binges of the Labor Party in government and provide sound financial management. We will pick up the tattered pieces of fiscal responsibility that the Labor Party has dropped and left scattered upon the ground and put them back together. We will address the intergenerational debt left for our children, and perhaps even for their children, but the Labor Party refuse to take responsibility for their poor decisions and consistently leave others to pick up their mess. We will wind back the red tape that binds business and strangles their productivity.

A coalition government will get this great nation back to business and get workers back to a job. An active business sector means jobs, and that is where our focus needs to be. During the recent campaign, we released a range of policies that will boost the economy and create jobs. These include: the coalition's policy to create jobs by boosting productivity, our 2030 Vision for Developing Northern Australia, our policy for boosting productivity and reducing regulation, our policy for jobs and growth in critical small business and our policy to boost manufacturing.

But the fight to get Australia back to work and balance our books is not over. Western Australia will soon play host to that battle once again. On 5 April the Western Australian people must again make a choice about the future of our entire nation, and it is a choice not to be taken lightly.

The task of getting Australia back into a sound fiscal position is no small one, as we on this side of the House understand only too well. And it is made all the harder by a Senate which refuses to recognise the need for change or accept the will of the Australian people as expressed in September last year. The Rudd and Gillard governments have left a legacy of budget mismanagement, budget deficits and intergenerational fiscal debt. Let no-one be in any doubt that that it is intergenerational fiscal debt. We are told that gross debt will peak at over $667 billion thanks to $123 billion in accumulated deficits.

As we know, the Labor Party could never achieve a budget surplus—even though they said they did. They certainly never ever provided a credible pathway back to a surplus. Instead we saw, as we know now, back-ended spending beyond the forward estimates period. As is the habit of Labor, they have left the heavy lifting to the coalition, who once again have no choice but to clean up the Labor mess.

The Labor and Green collaboration in the Senate has defied the will of the people long enough. Western Australia will soon have an opportunity to change this impasse. People in Western Australia will have an opportunity to say to Labor and to the Greens that enough is enough, and that they should get out of the way of important reforms that this country needs.