Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not know why you have that fascinated look on your face, Senator Conroy. You know that is the case. It was you, Senator Conroy, who said during Senate estimates that this decision was a government decision. So it is a government decision, and the government will have to accept the responsibility for what happens next. The surplus is gone. The ramifications economically are zero. The social impacts in some areas are going to be atrocious. The political benefit ultimately will fall into our laps, because the thing will not work. And what is going to be the response then? Is that when we will get the change of Treasurer that everyone is anticipating? Is that when that will happen? Are we going to load poor old Mr Swan up with this and send him over the cliff as the scapegoat on this issue?

Why couldn’t we have foreshadowed the stimulus through certain things as infrastructure, certain things that we can inspire the Australian nation with—a future cashflow, so that people can load up and start preparing for a future cashflow? You do not even have a clue at this point in time about what your contingent liability is on your banking guarantee. Ultimately, if you have to borrow money because you have squandered the money, people are going to ask the question: what sort of contingent liabilities are out there for them when they lend money to the Australian people? You do not have a clue what it is. What is the value of your guarantee? How much does it cost? Does anyone know? They will be the questions that the people who lend you the credit will be asking you, and that will be what affects your margin on the money they lend you.

And they will be lending us money. They will be lending us money, I predict, within 12 months because we will have run this nation into a deficit. And, if this plays out the way the world perceives it will, that will not even be the start of a period of great financial hardship throughout the world. I hope and pray that it is not. I hope and pray that we get out and that it finishes as quickly as possible, but it is going to be harder for Australia than it should have been, because what we built up over such a long period of time and the condition in which we gave the nation to the next government have been completely squandered within 12 months.

This is going to be a real test for the Labor Party, first, of whether they have the courage to change the form in which this payment turns up. They must acknowledge that the form in which it turns up in so many areas is going to be a social disaster. Do they have the courage at least to mitigate that effect, or do they pretend that they have an excuse for why certain families and certain households—certain working families—deserve that sort of blight to be brought home to them on 8 December? Do they have the honesty to come into the chamber and tell us what the long-term plan is because this money has gone—where they are going to be borrowing the money from, how much it is going to cost us and what the effect is on the Australian people by reason of other decisions that the government have made? Do they have the strength to politically stand behind their decision in the long term, or will they be looking for an out clause, an excuse, a reason as to why it was not their fault and it is someone else’s fault now? Will they have some other nebulous, nefarious reason why they are no longer at the helm of the economy and they are just another passenger on their own train to destitution?

It is always the way. I come from the state of Queensland, where they are heading now towards a debt of $65 billion, and in New South Wales it is a fiasco. This form of Labor Party management unfortunately is now coming to rest back on a federal level. It is not management at all; it is just ad hocery, and this ad hocery is going to cost Australia dearly.