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

That is the side that talks about their economic credibility, and today was pathos. It was amazing. A simple question was asked of Senator Conroy back on 11 August about what the face value was of Commonwealth government securities outstanding as at 10 August 2009. He took the question on notice. I was a bit worried as to whether he is actually the person who is supposed to be representing the Treasurer, so I checked that out and he is. But it did not really matter; he took the question on notice. At that point in time it was $106 billion, but he did not have a clue—not a clue. His way out of it was to say, ‘It’s not my responsibility.’ Do you know whose responsibility he said it was? He said it was Senator Sherry’s. So today we asked Senator Sherry, and what we got from Senator Sherry was an absolute clanger. We asked the question of the Assistant Treasurer, Nicholas Sherry, and he did not have a clue. He had three goes at answering the question about Australia’s debt as listed by the Australian Office of Financial Management as Commonwealth government securities outstanding. We were asking him how much was financed from overseas. He had not a clue. Then in his clanger of an answer—and this is from the people who are supposed to be able to manage the show—he came out with this:

With respect to debt, foreign debt, which is placed overseas, currently stands at some $678.3 billion …

It is actually $108.135 billion. It’s all right—he is only out by half $1 trillion! He is close: he’s half a trillion dollars away from the answer! And these are the people who are supposed to be telling us that they can manage the country.

It is beyond ridiculous. They just have this desire to wander out aimlessly onto the bond market. It is magic, you see—you just ask the bond market for money and they give you money. They just give it to you, and you do not have to worry about paying it back, you just keep collecting it. You keep taking it and the debt keeps racing up and up and up. On the 30th of the sixth, 2009, it was $101 billion; on the 30th of the seventh, it was $104 billion; on the 12th of the eighth, $107.5 billion. In the last couple of days it has gone up to $108.135 billion. The debt at a federal level keeps racing up, and then they have gone and underwritten their friends in state politics, their Labor Party mates. That is about $230 billion. And our font of knowledge, the Treasurer, tells us that the federal debt is going to go up to about $315 billion.

Let’s put all this money in the corner of the room and have a good hard look at it. We have got about $300 billion at a federal level. Let’s give them a couple of hundred billion dollars, plus some, at the states level. Let’s put a cost of funds, maybe seven per cent, on it. That makes about a $35 billion a year interest bill. We have never ever had a surplus of all the states and the federal government added together, in the best of boom times, that would pay our interest bill. And that is supposed to be Labor Party management.

As an accountant in this show, and unfortunately probably the only accountant in this show, I could tell you what happens next. You go broke. That is what happens when the client comes in and they cannot even get within a bull’s roar of the most basic questions. In this instance, the Labor Party government are being asked questions on behalf of the Australian people. In fact, they cannot even give you an answer. It was completely and utterly pathetic. Senator Sherry stumbled through answering a repeat of the question followed by another repeat of the question, he could not even get close, and then they try to tell you that they are decisive. They use that metaphor, but what does ‘decisive’ mean in their dictionary? Vague apparitions of suggested ideas; stumbling around; economic incompetence—that is what they personified. You can always tell when a client is on the skids, because they lose control of the actual money that they owe and they cannot answer the fundamental questions. This is what has happened here. The next thing that clients that are going broke do is that they start spending money on ridiculous ideas like there is no tomorrow. So we find out that this nation has $3.9 billion of borrowings because they have spent all the dough. They started with $21.6 billion of cash in the bank but they blew that. They blew that in about 10 months—the whole lot, up against the wall; off it went. I remember one day they put about $8.7 billion in cheques in the mail—out it went.

Money is not precious to the Labor Party. Money means nothing—you just toss it around. You see, it is magic stuff; when you run out, you just run out to the bond market and borrow some more. But the day is going to come when you go to the bond market and they say these horrible words to you; like the bank manager, they are going to say: ‘No. You can’t have any more.’

The government are going to spend $3.9 billion on ceiling installation up in the roof for the rats and mice to urinate on. I do not know what we are going to do with that. What are we going to do when we have to pay the money back? Dig the batts back out and send them back to China or wherever they came from? How are we going to deal with this?

Then there is the $890 million spent on boom gates. I do not remember a promise at the election for a boom gate bonanza. These $890 million worth of boom gates must be around somewhere, stuck behind a shed somewhere waiting to be installed by the Labor Party. Then there are the one-off payments—$12.7 billion shovelled out the door in $900 cheques. You are kidding me. And you talk about economic management! That is complete and utter profligacy. That is profligate waste of Australian taxpayers’ money, and now it is just a mountain of debt.

Every time you see one of your marvellous school halls that are being parked around the countryside—they are not going to increase people’s mathematics or English marks—you are going to have to imagine where this money comes from. When you see the school hall, imagine the flag of the Communist People’s Republic of China draped over about a third of it, because I reckon that is where the money is coming from; then imagine another flag from the Middle East draped over about another 10 to 20 per cent of it, because that is where that amount of money is coming from; and then imagine sundry flags from other nations around the world, because it is all borrowed money and it all has to be repaid.

Have they delivered an exit plan of how they are going to repay this money? No—not a smidgen, not a clue. Yet they have the gall to walk in here and talk about themselves as economic managers. Neither the Treasurer, the Assistant Treasurer, the Prime Minister nor anybody else in the cabinet has been able to table even a skerrick of a detail as to how we will pay this money back. They have not got a clue. So how are the Australian people going to pay this money back? The best we can get is two bullet points on, I think, pages 6 and 7 of that wondrous little orange booklet that Treasurer Swan handed out. It basically says, ‘When things get better, we’ll pay the money back.’ I wish it were that easy. If it were, I would try that out on my bank manager: ‘I want to borrow some money.’ ‘How much do you want?’ ‘A couple of lazy mill, if you’ve got it hanging around.’ ‘How are you going to pay it back, Mr Joyce?’ ‘Well, I’m going to say what our Treasurer would say: when things get better, I’ll pay you the money back.’ I just do not think it works that way.

Then we have Senator Sherry, who completely botches an answer. He was out by half a trillion dollars a day; that is correct, but what is half a trillion dollars between a couple of mates? Do not worry about that; just sweep it along. But what is concerning about that is that the lack of detail illustrates their lack of connection to the real problems. What we do know is that back in February we asked Dr Hyden from the Australian Office of Financial Management, ‘When you think this $200 billion facility, this $200 billion worth of debt, will be drawn down?’ He replied, ‘In about 2013-14.’ We asked Dr Hyden the same question two months later, in April. By that time, it was 2011. That is the mad trajectory we are on, but it is going to come unstuck. So Labor have got a cunning plan to get around this—a cunning plan to deal with it. Their cunning plan is called the CPRS—a cunning plan to stop the Australian people from realising that the economy is RS. The way they are going to do it is to bring on a double dissolution before the budget next year so that they can get around the fact that the books are in oblivion. This is the cunning plan of the Labor Party.

So the Labor Party have gone forward. First of all, they spent the money we had. We had $21.6 billion in the bank, and they went and spent that and a heap of provisions. They blew that in about 10 months. Then they spent the money we do not have—that is, they went out on a borrowing frenzy. Recently they have tried to inspire a reduction in interest rates and to get a stimulus going. I will be the prophet for the Labor Party; I can tell you where this will end up: it will end up with a thing called quantitative easing. That is where they are off to—quantitative easing. That is where they print the money. Of course, once we arrive at that point, it is game, set and match for the Australian economy; it is all over. They come in here and say that they are managing the economy. Well, they are managing to flush it down the toilet; that is what they are managing to do.

Sooner or later the penny is going to have to drop: you have to pay this money back. There is somebody somewhere who wants their money back and, if you do not pay it back, they are going to get very upset. But we will look at the trajectory of debt and see how it keeps going up and up and up and we will keep asking you the question. Every day we will ask the question. They have got more myths and fables over there than Aesop. It is incredible. It just goes on. Every day a new myth, a new fable, a new dragon to slay: ‘The Prime Minister’s going to save the world’ and ‘The Prime Minister’s going to cool the planet.’ Is he? No, not a skerrick of a chance. But he is going to devise a whole policy that includes a new tax for the whole of our nation.

If what they say is true—if we are in the middle of a financial crisis and we are to be so concerned—what is their magic bullet that we are going to cop between the eyes? Their magic bullet is an emissions trading scheme. They are the only government that is proposing as the absolute centrepiece of government policy a mechanism to make a bad situation worse. Who in their right mind would suggest a tax on every productive section of the economy that actually pays the bills to pay the debt? Who could possibly do it? Let us pretend that Australia is its own business. The government are going to go around that business and everything that actually produces something, that puts something on a boat and send it overseas, whether it is in the mining industry, the agricultural industry, the aluminium industry—the ones that actually make us money—they are going to tax. The government are going to put an overhead on it that is going to start forcing businesses overseas.

Even today in Rockhampton the cement industry is closing down. Why? One reason is some lunatic government policy that they will solo—by themselves—cool the planet. For that reason people in Rockhampton are now on the street. Working families are losing their jobs. You talk about your advocacy for the working family. I tell you the first thing you have to do for working families: keep them in a job. That is priority No. 1: keep them in a job. There is nothing romantic about being unemployed. That is what the CPRS is going to do. You will say, ‘Oh, that is rhetoric.’ No. That is happening. That is happening today. That is happening now. People are foreshadowing this and seeing it coming towards them. Already businesses are making the decision. They are quitting, running and leaving Australian working families on the street. Later on they will go up to Mackay and do it. Then they will go down to the Illawarra and to the Hunter Valley and do it.

I cannot believe that Mr Combet is going to do that to his own people, to the working families of his own area. He is going to put their jobs under threat. They try to gauge it and get around it and say, ‘When there’s a problem, it’s somebody else’s problem.’ They are actually devising the economic policy that is doing this. They are not only going to do this but doing it right now. It is happening today. It is already happening. What do they put forward? They are the economic managers. We are heading to a position under this crowd where we will not even be able to meet our interest payments. We asked this question back in Senate economics committee hearings. I think it was in estimates. When we cannot pay the interest bill, where are we going to get the money from? Where do you get the money from when you cannot pay the interest bill? Do you know what the Labor Party are going to do? They are going to borrow it. Of course they are going to borrow it. They are going to borrow the money to pay the interest bill. In accountancy parlance, that is called ‘economic palliative care’. It is the last thing that happens.

When you start capitalising your interest, the bank manager calls you into the office and says: ‘Goodnight, Irene. It is all over.’ But they are doing it. They are economic managers. The first thing a good, prudent economic manager does is give you a forecast for how you are going to run off your debt. They give you a peak debt position and say when that is going to occur. Then, as you track to program, you prove your competency. You prove that you have an understanding of the economic paradigm in which you are working. I can assure the Australian people they have no idea of the economic paradigm they are working in. There is not one prediction they have made that they are able to keep to. On the credit paper that the Australian public is borrowing against, via the Labor Party, they have not managed to keep to one condition. Every one of the gates they said they were going to meet in managing their debt they have missed. They have not just missed them but missed them completely.

When one of their senior operatives, the Assistant Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia, came into the nation’s Senate he was asked the most basic question. So help me, he got the answer wrong by half a trillion dollars. It is beyond belief that this is happening to us. There is a stunned-mullet look across the front bench, as they stumble around trying to answer the questions. They just do not care about it. They have no concept of repaying money. They have no idea. There is no acumen. There is no study. There is no late-night sitting down, getting out the calculator and the spreadsheets and saying, ‘Let’s work out where this show goes.’ They do not know. The Australian people are blindly going along saying, ‘I think they’ve got it under control.’ The Assistant Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia proved today that it is not under control. The good ship Australia is rudderless and out of control, and they are whooping it up on the decks. It is champagne and caviar on the decks, but the ship is heading towards the rocks.

I cannot believe they took on notice questions on some of the most fundamental principles. Even when they were forewarned that the question was going to come, because it was asked the previous week, they blew it again. Who in the Labor Party is running the show? Who in the Labor Party does know what is going on? Who do we refer the questions to? We have tried Senator Conroy and we have tried the Assistant Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia. Who do we ask next time? I might give Dougie a crack at it. I would have just as much luck. There is no-one there.