Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I think it is very clear to most Australians these days that, whether it be at state or federal level, you simply cannot trust the Labor Party with money. The Labor Party has a long history of incompetence when it comes to managing the economy. Younger people will not recall the Hawke-Keating years. They certainly would not recall the Whitlam years, which really started Australia on a downward spiral that took Malcolm Fraser a long time to correct. The Hawke-Keating years saw the economy get to a stage where it had run up a debt of some $96 billion. It was quite unheard of in those days. We well remember, during the Keating treasurership and prime ministership, paying something like 17 per cent interest on a housing loan. Young people today will not believe that when you tell them, but they might believe it in a couple of years when the interest rates get up that high as a result of this government’s financial ineptitude.

For a business loan in those days—if you could get a loan—you were paying anything from 22 per cent to 28 per cent. This was all a result of Labor’s complete mismanagement of the economy. Unemployment in those days was up around 10 per cent and inflation was into double-digit figures. As Labor does not understand, debt has to be repaid. I was part of a government that took 10 years to pay off Labor’s $96 billion debt. The ability of Mr Keating and Mr Hawke to run up debt pales into insignificance when compared with the current government. A debt of $188 billion is what we are facing now. That money, which was borrowed by this government from lenders, will have to be repaid one day and we will be paying interest of something like $8 billion every year.

The thing that the Labor Party clearly do not understand—and I regret to say that those people who are gleefully accepting their $900 cheques do not seem to realise it either is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. When you borrow money, someone has to repay it. People think: ‘Governments have got money. They can afford to give out $14 billion in cash splashes.’ But that is not right. Governments do not have any money whatsoever. They simply use taxpayers’ money. They use someone else’s money. All of this money that the Labor Party is now borrowing will have to be repaid some day. As Senator Brandis and Senator Mason have said, Labor will never pay off this debt. They do not even anticipate doing it.