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

This is really going to be something that I am sure the fourth estate will pore through with great interest in exactly what was going on around this chamber, and I hope that they will hold people to account. I hope that Greens supporters realise that they were sold out yesterday and that, when push comes to shove, they are the minor party of the Labor Party and they do the Labor Party’s bidding. Good luck to Senator Xenophon because he managed to exploit that. He outread them; he outsmarted the lot of them.

Unfortunately, I do believe that where we are now is a very precarious position. It is an extremely precarious position because no-one knows. We have just two bullet points with which to try to work out how we are going to repay this money, and into the future we will have all the things that will be compromised including health and education. There is the fact that state Labor governments are completely and utterly financially destitute, and soon there will be no capacity for a federal government to bail them out. So the delivery of basic services such as in health and education are all compromised because of the excessive debt that this places on the nation. There is the fact that it will drive up interest rates—for every per cent it goes up that is $10,000 per million for every Australian with that facility; for every house facility there is $500,000 and that is $5,000 per house facility per per cent. This is the cost of a Labor government.

It is amazing to note the acceleration of the trajectory to oblivion that the Labor Party are taking us on—from being $21 billion in credit to now, with the passing of a facility, allowing them to put $200 billion on the nation’s credit card. Everybody can see exactly where we are going. There is the fact that they have told us they do not know how to repay the money, so we are going to be capitalising the interest and it will be heading—this is after your stimulus package, which is coming up—towards, I imagine, around $10 billion per year. This is where our nation is going. We are going there in a handbasket, thanks to Labor Party management.

We will hold you sitting opposite  to account over the next couple of years. We will come back into this chamber again and again and again and ask, ‘What happened to that stimulus package?’ This stimulus package will be like the first stimulus package, which we stated right from the start would be a flop. It was a flop; there were no jobs. And from this one there is no efficacy, no outcome, but what we have is a path to perdition, a path to oblivion, delivered to us by the Labor Party.