David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Burundi is a fine country but, unfortunately, they do not enjoy the same standard of living as Australians enjoyed under the Howard years. If you want to take our economy back to that state, that is fine, but we will be fighting against it. Here we are, in 2009, under a Rudd Labor government, and all the work that was done under the Howard coalition years has been undone. Commonwealth spending is sitting at a phenomenal 28 per cent of GDP. At $56 billion, or almost five per cent of GDP, next year’s budget is forecast to be our biggest since World War II. But remember that new spending accounts for two-thirds of the projected net debt. Two-thirds of the projected new debt is accounted for by discretionary new spending. More than $124 billion of spending has been added to the bottom line by decisions this government has made which it did not have to make. That needs to be remembered whenever these interjectors raise the points they have raised today.

The thing to remember in terms of where we are currently at and how different it would be if the Labor Party had not won the last election is the conduct of the government during the first 10 months of their term. What was the first thing they did when they got in? Basically they said: ‘Okay, we’ve inherited a great economy. What do we do to label the coalition as poor economic managers? What can we find? Where’s the hole?’ They found one little thing, and that was that there was inflationary pressure—because we had an economy that was going so well. There were small inflationary pressures, but they had found something that they could use. What did they do as a result of that? They spent the next 10 months talking the economy down.