David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Acting Deputy President. This government plan s to means test the private health insurance rebate, which will further hurt Australians trying to provide for their families. And if that is not bad enough, they have now announced in the budget that they will strip $2 billion from Australian families by freezing the indexation of key family tax payments and income thresholds for the next three years. I will talk a little bit more about that later.

This government claims to want to get more Australians into work but at the same time it is hellbent on punishing the hard workers who are already out there having a go and trying to get ahead. This Labor go vernment has spent recklessly and is now forcing middle-class Australian families and small businesses to pay it back. Australians are being forced to pay for a multitude of the Gillard Labor government ' s policy failures. Labor ' s failure to control our borders has increased the cost of offshore asylum seeker management by a whopping $1.7 billion. And now Australian taxpayers are being asked to pay a further $292.3 million for the Malaysian solution. So ridiculously out of control is asylum seeker management under this government that they now need to build a detention centre in my home state of Tasmania, at a cost to taxpayers of $15 million, to house illegal entrants coming through Far North Australia.

Then of course there are all the other costly policy failures. There was the Building the Education Revolution, which delivered buildings that schools in many cases neither needed nor , in some cases , could even use.

Senator Polley interjecting —

An example from your home state and my home state, Senator Polley, is Port Sorell School. The Wesley Vale Primary School is due to be closed down upon the building of the Port Sorell School, which the state Labor government says it is going to build —but we have not seen a lot of proof that it is going to happen. Nonetheless, it has committed to build a new school at Port Sorell, less than 10 kilometres away from the Wes ley Vale Primary School. This will leave four students at Wesley Vale . Basically the school will be closed down when the Port Sorell School is built. So they got a million-dollar new building at the Wesley Vale Primary School—a school that is due to close in the next couple of years. What an absolute waste of money!

But there is more. The computers in schools program has blown out by a further $200 million, taking its total cost so far to $1.4 billion—more than double what was originally budgeted. There have been the numerous green schemes that have failed, such as the cash-for-clunkers scheme that was in itself a clunker, and the tragic and grossly wasteful pink batt scheme that has seen hundreds of millions of dollars having to be spent to fix the problems that it created. And let us not forget that this is the government whose solution to the GFC was to send $900 cheques to people living overseas.

To add insult to injury, Australian families are not only paying for these failed schemes but also funding the advertising campaigns too . There was $13 million wasted on adve ­ rtising Rudd ' s now obsolete health reforms.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Order! You should ensure that you correctly refer to members of this chamber and the other chamber by their correct titles.

Duly noted, Mr Acting Deputy President. There was $13 million wasted on advertising the then Prime Minister Mr Rudd ' s now obsolete health reforms. And they cannot rule out a $30 million ad campaign to try to justify their carbon tax.

The Gillard Labor government have squandered the financial prosperity that the coalition left them. They have exceeded Prime Minister Keating's debt record of $96 billion and, for the first time in eight years, they have delivered a budget that has not delivered tax cuts for everyday Australians. However, even in the face of such appalling circumstances, they have not learnt their lesson. In their ongoing commitment to debt and deficit budgeting, they have hit Australian families and businesses with $6 billion in new and higher taxes. Along with the Greens, they have committed to intro­ducing a carbon tax from 1 July 2012. However, they have not included any of the detail in the budget. They do not want to tell Australian families and businesses how much it will cost them, but they do expect them to pay for it.But this in itself is amazing: given the proposed starting date of 1 July 2012—right in the middle of the figures contained in this week's budget—it is impossible to take anything the budget includes beyond that as at all relevant or accurate. This is the case even if you accept the Labor government's argument that it is not possible or appropriate to include forecasts of the effect of the carbon tax in these figures—and I do not accept that. What is undeniable is that the carbon tax will have a massive impact on those figures, both directly and in second- and third-round effects and so on once it is implemented. Those figures are not worth the paper they are written on.

So as ordinary Australians continue to face real challenges to meet the cost of their household bills, Labor continue to waste money and to present their accounts in ways and with exclusions that mask the true state of where we are heading. The fact remains that this Labor government are tough on families and tough on household budgets but fail to be tough on their own wasteful spending. Treasurer Wayne Swan has told us that he will have balanced the budget by the 2012-13 budget year.