Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In two years Labor will exceed its previous high point, and already debt is at $78 billion. I note the interjection from Senator O’Brien about paying back the debt. Let us put this in perspective. In the next three years the government is allegedly going to have a $1 billion surplus. At that rate, it will take 450 years to pay off your nonsensical spending.

If you had not squandered billions of dollars on the pink batts program you could have doubled the surplus, because you are going to spend another billion dollars fixing up the disaster that no minister has been held accountable for. The minister responsible still sits at the cabinet table, getting his fat ministerial salary for nothing. Then there are the hundreds of millions of dollars which you have spent and wasted on your extreme climate change folly, which the minister did not even know was dumped by the all controlling and commanding socialist-in-chief, Kevin Rudd. She did not even know that it was going to be dumped. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been squandered.

This is a government that is absolutely drunk on reckless spending. There is no doubt about that. It has not managed its expenditure. It only knows: ‘There’s something that’s profitable; we’ll grab the cash from it.’ The government dresses it up in public health measures, like it did with the alcopops tax, which did not see alcopops, or ready-to-drink drinks, consumption fall at all. The government says it is going to reduce the incidence of smoking by putting the price up. Will we see the same result as that of the failed alcopops policy? Probably. Now the government is going to go into the mining sector, which has been the driver of growth and wealth in our economy, and tax the heart out of that.

This is a government without a heart. It says it is going into bat for the people, but it is not. It has no plan to deal with the 500,000 people whose livelihoods are dependent on the mining industry in this country. Some of those jobs will go—make no mistake about it. We already know that industries are going to be closing up here. We know that they are going to move their exploration and mines offshore because they think it is a punitive tax regime.

Not all the people on the other side believe in this. There are some who have been shut down, although I will not call them economic conservatives. The reasonable people have been shut down because the extreme Left is on the march. The government might indeed trot out someone like Senator Hutchins or Senator Polley, people who should know better, to defend some nonsensical lines that have put out by the Rudd bureaucracy, or central casting, but the fact is their heart is not in it. We know the government’s heart is in closing down industry. We know that this government is going to spend $36½ million dollars in the next couple of years promoting a review of taxation of which it has implemented one of 138 measures. We also know the government is going to spend a further $126 million, including over $30 million in this financial year, advertising government programs like their climate change program. Remember that one? What happened to that? That was ditched without even Minister Wong knowing.

This government is a fraud, it is phoney, it is led by a phoney, it is led by a fake and the Australian people are waking up to the shemozzles that it is producing.