Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

That went to an election. I will take that interjection, Senator McLucas. I dare you to take this to an election. You will not. You are hoping that the people forget. You will wear this like a ball and chain. You are scared, and that is why you are talking more about the opposition than your own agenda. You can tell when Labor is scared. You see it in New South Wales now. You saw it in Victoria with John Brumby last November. When Labor talks about the opposition rather than itself, you know it is running scared. The ghost of Julia past will haunt the present and the future of this government, and those words will ring in people’s ears until the next election day.

I briefly move on to the issue of debt and deficit, which was so blithely dismissed by a previous speaker from the government side. I grew up in the 1990s in Victoria in the aftermath of Cain and Kirner, the intellectual and spiritual forebears of the current New South Wales Labor government and the recession that we had to have, told to us by the then Treasurer, Paul Keating. But debt and deficits are nothing less than deferred taxation. The ultimate irony of the BER is that the kids in those very school facilities are going to pay higher taxes and have fewer opportunities in their working years to pay back the debt that funded those facilities. This government is guaranteeing higher taxes and fewer opportunities for future Australians. If anyone in this country could not think of a better way to spend $16 billion on our education system, then they are not trying. Ill-designed, shabbily built school halls that take over playgrounds are not education reform.

You can use the word ‘revolution’ all you want so it sounds fancy—that has nothing to do with education—and your defence is that it was stimulus. It is still being spent now. The Reserve Bank is putting up interest rates and you are still spending stimulus. It shows you how farcical this was and the defence is to say that only three per cent of projects had a problem. I remember when a few hundred million dollars was serious money and the only defence this government can come up with is that it had to shovel the money out the door so quickly you would expect a few hundred million to be wasted. This side of the chamber takes its responsibilities much more seriously.