Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

And John Brumby. It is just extraordinary that the government is now looking to place another tax—the flood tax—on the Australian people. It is interesting that, if the government had not wasted billions and billions of dollars, there would be absolutely no need for the tax. This is a point that the Australian people need to recognise very clearly: this Labor government under Julia Gillard is putting forward a flood tax only because it mismanaged the economy so badly that it simply has no choice but to try to gain some money in any way, shape or form. So it came up with a tax.

If the government had not wasted those billions of dollars on those programs—because it simply cannot manage money—we would not even need to be talking about a tax. As my good colleague in the other place the member for Riverina said recently, ‘The best management for natural disasters is for a government to have a surplus.’ He is absolutely spot-on and that is what we left this government—a $20 billion surplus. The government got rid of that pretty darn quickly, didn’t it? It is true to form. Successive Labor governments have had no understanding of how to manage money or an economy. They just keep spending.