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

not made in this nation, putting your workers out of a job, Senator Cameron. You are supposed to be looking after the working man, Senator Cameron, but oh no, you could not do that. And then you get upset.

Look at the ridiculous position they have now put us in. We are in a position of arbitrage and they created it; a position of arbitrage, where our interest rates are higher than the United States’s interest rates. They are going up, and you are forcing them up. That arbitrage itself is forcing up interest rates; it is putting pressure on every Australian working family—every per cent this interest rate goes up. It costs you $5,000 per per cent for bad Labor Party management: $5,000 per per cent per house facility for bad Labor Party management. This is what we have got.

What did you get for your $110 billion worth of debt, Australia? What did you get for your $170 billion worth of debt, states? What did they give you? They gave you high interest rates, they gave you a collapsing economy and they gave you a person with no idea. They are following the IMF and this is what we get. We have got higher interest rates forcing up. Now they are trying to explain to people that higher interest rates are what they are looking for. They are using higher interest rates as a recommendation for their government. That is what we have got: higher interest rates as a recommendation of the Labor government.

How long did it take them to get us to this position? They are not even through their first term. So now we have the position where we have got a major overhead on our economy that is going to suck the blood out of our economy. If we look at the stimulus package itself, if we had built some constructive assets with the money they wasted—even if they had built a pipeline to take the water out of the north and take it to the south, and if those pipes had rotted in the paddock, we would have got more stimulant out of that than what they delivered to us: no aggregate increase in our economy.

Then Mr Swan comes up and says, ‘I have saved you from the recession.’ The effect of the stimulus package was 0.8 of one per cent, but exports went up by 20 per cent. They say that their 0.8 per cent is better than the 20 per cent increase in exports. They say that their stimulus apparently put coal on ships, it put wheat on ships and it did all these marvellous things. Their stimulus did nothing but load you up with masses of debt! And now we have got a dollar that is appreciating because we have got an arbitrage in the interest rates. We have to attract money into the economy; but do not worry—it will turn around. In about May next year it will all turn around—the dollar will meet a point of equilibrium and it will start to fall over. What will we get as it falls over? Interest rate pressure on interest rate pressure. The Australian people can thank the Labor Party and that is why they are busting themselves to get to an election before it all goes pop. We know that is going to happen.

To add to this wondrous mix of Labor Party management, what have we got? The ETS. How are you going to prop up the parlous state of the finances? Where are you going to get the money from to pay for the interest bill? Where is that going to come from? It is going to come from the emissions trading scheme, this moral bulwark that they move out. They are going to cure the climate. They have stuffed up the books but apparently they can cure the climate. Today we had the Labor Party backbenchers talking about sea level rises. Apparently the ETS, like King Canute, is going to solve the tide. They can do everything! They are amazing! They are unstoppable! They are saving the tide and they are saving the climate but they are stuffing up the books. They could not run a chook raffle in a pub on a Friday night. They are beyond low contempt—they are hopeless.

We will wait. Every day you can ask, ‘How big is the debt today?’ It goes up and up; a billion dollars per week, Australia.