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

‘A lot of infrastructure money’, says Senator McLucas. Sure, but it is infrastructure money for Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. What about the country? What have the government done for rural and regional Australia in this budget? They have slashed the leading government department, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, by 40 per cent of its funding. It is just incredible that that department has been gutted by the government, who have no interest whatsoever in rural and regional Australia. I heard Senator Carr waxing on at question time about the absolute necessity for good research and development, but he would not take my interjection about Land and Water Australia and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, one of which has been abolished and the other of which has been gutted such that it will not be able to do any research whatsoever into the future. The Labor Party claim they are interested in research and development, yet they slash funding from the research and development budget.

Even on the Labor Party’s own assessment of the budget, unemployment will go up to almost one million of our fellow Australians. This is getting back to the Whitlam days. If that is the Labor Party estimate, you can be assured that it is going to be much worse. Senator Williams reminded me earlier that, in Mr Kerin’s days as Treasurer, the Labor government used to come in here with forecasts of a $2 billion budget deficit, but by the time the year had elapsed the deficit would be double that. The Labor Party simply cannot be trusted with money. They have no financial expertise and no real interest in it. They know that they will not be around to pay off the $188 billion debt. They do know, though, that in the next budget they will have to find $8 billion to pay the interest on the debts they are running up.

Who could believe that two short years ago this country had a surplus of $20 billion? We had money put aside in the bank, in reserve, to pay for the future. We were future-proofing Australia. Well, we thought we were future-proofing Australia. We did not count on the fact that there would be a Labor government in charge that simply could not be trusted with money. In two short years we have gone from being the miracle economy of the world, as the OECD used to describe us, to a country that is deep in debt—$188 billion in debt.