Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It is a fact. Accumulated Labor government debt is never, ever paid off, Senator Collins; and the disgrace of your party’s history is that you do not mind spending money but you never pay it back. That is the disgrace of the Australian Labor Party and that is why no-one believes that they will pay this money back. In fact, not even Mr Rudd believes it—but let me get to that in a minute. The point is this: it does not need to be this way. It takes a long time to pay back Labor government debt. Twice in our history, under long-serving coalition governments—under the McMahon government and then under the Howard-Costello government—this country has actually been without net government debt. It took a long time to pay off Labor’s debt. When you have government debt, you have to pay the interest bill. After the previous Labor government, the interest bill alone was $8 billion a year. The coalition has twice had to pay off Labor’s debt—under the McMahon government and under the Howard government. So the question with the $124 billion debt at the moment—and it is going to be closer to $200 billion or $300 billion—