Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Let us call this what it is. The Auditor-General Amendment Bill 2011 is about making small business pay for the incompetence and the mismanagement of this Labor government over the past four years. We have this bill because the Labor government made a complete mess of the pink batts arrangement. This government decided to send billions of dollars out into the Australian economy to get people to put pink batts into their roofs. It is a matter of historical record that we had fires, deaths and all sorts of issues. In this $2½ billion program, after the government had spent half they then had to spend the other half to fix up the mess.

Because this government stuffs up, because this government does not know how to administer a program and because this government does not know how to do its job, who has to carry the can? Who has to pay the price for it? Small business does. The truth of the matter is that there were inherent flaws in what the government did at the time. No amount of auditing, no amount of additional red tape and no amount of increased compliance burdens would have addressed those inherent flaws.

Senator Bishop is now the chair of the Economics Committee, so let us have a conversation about economics. When you have a government that suddenly puts billions of dollars into the economy, saying, 'We want people to spend this money on putting pink batts into their roofs,' and all of a sudden you get all these people across Australia saying, 'I've got this free money and I know I have to spend it putting pink batts into my roof,' guess what happens? The level of supply available in the Australian economy cannot match the artificially increased demand for that particular product or service.

We have a government that incompetently decides to put billions of dollars into the economy to create an artificial demand that the market cannot supply. And what happens? Hundreds of thousands of cowboys come in and said: 'There's all this money going around. The government is throwing taxpayers' money around like confetti. I want a piece of that. I can do that. I might not have the expertise, I might not have the track record, I might not have the experience and I might not know what I'm doing. What I'm doing might be completely unprofessional and it might put lives at risk. It might put the lives of my workers at risk. But there's all this government money going around, and I want a piece of that cake. I'm going to put some of these pink batts into people's roofs, even though I haven't got what it takes to make it happen.'

Here we have a government that has just thrown billions of dollars into the economy, creating artificial demand that cannot be met from the supply available in the market. All these cowboys come in and provide very bad service, with all the consequences that have been well documented. Then, of course, the inevitable happens: the government, under appropriate political pressure, has to pull the pin on the program, because there is an understandable outcry across the Australian economy about its incompetence, which has put lives at risk and caused fires in houses around Australia. The government then has to do the inevitable: it has to pull the money out of the program.

What happens then? You have the established suppliers—the people who know what they are doing, the people who have a good, solid small business, the people who actually provide a service that is valued by people across Australia—all of a sudden being confronted with competition from all these cowboys who were attracted by the government's taxpayer funded honey pot. Then all of a sudden the government pulls out the money. So all of a sudden what happens in the markets? I hope that the chair of the economics committee—the government senator representing the Labor Party on the economics committee—reflects on what I am talking about here, because he knows that this is true. As soon as the government then says, 'Okay, we've got to take all of this money away now,' we now have all these suppliers and services out there—the cowboys as well as the established businesses—but now we have taken all of the demand out of the market. What happens? All of a sudden all of the Australian small businesses—the good businesses who were able to provide a service that was valued and who knew what they were doing, along with all of the cowboys—have not got any business anymore, because the whole market collapses. All of a sudden their businesses are under pressure. All of a sudden their businesses collapse alongside the cowboys.

No amount of additional red tape would have prevented that from happening. We wrote the script before the government went ahead with this—this Labor government, which does not understand the economy, does not know how to manage money, does not understand the consequences of its decisions, does not think things through and does not understand the impact that its decisions are having on real people. We have Senator Ludwig here, the minister who made an ill-thought-out decision out of nowhere to ban all exports of all live cattle—boom!—at the stroke of a pen, hurting thousands of Australian families. Of course, we get this again and again and again. This is a government which does not think things through. This is a government which does not understand the real-life consequences of its decisions. Then, once the shit hits the fan, rather than deal with the actual—