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

Senator Polley, I would like to hear your plan for the economic management of the country. I would be happy to hear from you on that. We have a situation now where we are borrowing around $100 million a day. This government is completely inept. The government borrowed $4 billion just last week.

Imagine if we said this to our kids, ‘Okay, we have completely mismanaged the household budget. The debt has racked up to a huge limit. We are completely out of control. By the way, we are going to hop into your little piggy bank for a flood tax, kids. Give us that as well because we have been so bad at managing the money.’ That is the analogy: you are going into the piggy banks of the Australian people because you are so inept and you have not got a single clue about how to manage an economy. That is not fair to the Australian people. When we have a budget of more than $350 billion, it is simply not on for this government to not be able to find savings of $1.8 billion but instead choose to tax the Australian people. They cannot possibly think outside of the box: ‘We are in a bit of a financial situation, what do we do?’ ‘I know, a tax will be the go because that is what we always do and that is what we’re comfortable with. Taxing the Australian people is a really good idea.’