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

So how you are going to net it off and use it, gosh only knows. So we will actually have to find the $7.5 billion. Let us look at the HECS debt so elegantly put forward by Mr Tanner. I think the HECS liability out there at the moment is about $17 million—or maybe it is $17 billion; I will have to find out—but I know what has been paid back: only one. That is a six per cent return, principal and interest, so one would suggest the interest component of that is dramatically less. This is the sort of economics we are getting.

I would ask the minister to be more decisive—we are getting a lot of that in the lingua franca—in clearly spelling out exactly where the interest receipts are going to come from to net off the debt. We have the ridiculous scenario now where they are saying: ‘On the bond market we will owe the world close to $200 billion, but we are going to net that off against the Future Fund, with an indeterminate income stream, and we are going to net it off against the HECS debt, with an indeterminate income stream, and other issues with an indeterminate income stream.’ That is like saying, ‘I went to the bank the other day and borrowed $200 billion and then I saw a friend down at the local hotel and lent him $100 billion, so my position in the world is I am only out there for the balance, for $100 billion.’ They are completely different outcomes. Your whole concept of netting two indeterminate flows, of linking two disarticulated issues, is bizarre. How can you manage to link these two things together?

So I ask: can you please now definitively and decisively tell us, the Australian people, what makes up the interest component of the $4.8 billion in receipts? What reliability is there in that income stream? Is there actually a guarantee of any income stream from that $4.8 billion? Does it have the same requirements as what will be the definitive and decisive payment that you will have to make for the $7.5 billion as we hock up our nation’s credit card to a $200 billion limit? For the sake of expediency I will not, as the Labor Party are doing, hold this debate up for 15 minutes. I just want an answer.