Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I must congratulate Senator Ian Macdonald for that outstanding contribution. Whilst he was referencing the appropriation bills so eloquently, I was taken by his reference to Queensland Premier Mrs Bligh and her lack of integrity and the lack of trust that the Queensland people could have in her. It made me cast my mind back to the last South Australian election when, in a fog or a mist of sleaze and innuendo, there was this promise by the then Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, that he would serve a full term as Premier. But, of course, we know that that was not true. It reinforces the point that Senator Macdonald has made so well: that you cannot trust Labor in any election environment. What Mrs Bligh has said about Campbell Newman, a very good man, is once again illustrative of that.

But I will take issue with one thing that Senator Macdonald said, because Mrs Bligh actually had the wherewithal to admit that she had no evidence for the smears she was making against Campbell Newman. We have a Prime Minister who did not tell the truth to the Australian people, who muttered these infamous words: 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' She was then elected, then broke that promise, and then had the temerity to say that she was keeping her commitment to pricing carbon—notwithstanding the fact that she had ruled it out in its entirety. If you have to look for any sort of silver lining or you want to gild the lily with respect to Labor premiers, at least Premier Bligh admitted she had no basis for making her grubby smears, unlike our own Prime Minister who has repeatedly misled the Australian people and refuses to admit that even to herself, which is quite extraordinary.

The reason that I wanted to speak on Appropriation Bill (No.3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012 is that before I came into this place I spent a number of years trying to help individuals with their finances. One of the things that I did was write a short book for children to demonstrate and illustrate to them that they could change their financial future by making a few key habits. One of the important principles I have tried to instil as I have distributed tens of thousands of these books complimentarily across Australia is that you should never spend more than you earn. Yet how can that message sink in with our young people today when we have a government that do not understand anything about spending restraint? They see a problem and they think that a tax will solve that problem.

The government have introduced two taxes most recently—the carbon tax and the mining tax—which, incredibly as it sounds, are going to cost more—due to implementation costs and the payments as a result of them—than they are actually going to raise. So the government are going to have a negative bottom line for the budget. So they introduce new taxes which punish everyday Australians—the mums and dads out there who are already battling with their family budgets—and our budget bottom line nationally is going to be worse off. This should concern all of us.

I have to remind this place and I have to remind the Australian people that you cannot borrow your way to prosperity. In the end, you have to pay back the money. In four years, we have $169 billion worth of debt—and the repayment obligation of that will fall not to me, as a 42-year-old in this place, but to my children and possibly their grandchildren. This government are clocking up debt at such a rate they are sending us down the path that European nations have found themselves—and still they refuse to confront the problem, which is their inappropriate and wasteful spending. I do not think I have to remind the Australian people that, if you spend a billion dollars putting pink batts into houses—burn a few down, kill a few people along the way—and a billion dollars to pull them out again, it is not a good policy; it is disgrace.

And this is a disgrace too, because they are asking for another $3 billion to mop up the damage from their carbon tax bill—the carbon tax bill that was promised would never be introduced under any government led by Ms Gillard. The only conclusion I can draw out of that is that Ms Gillard is not leading this government; that there are some other people on the grassy knoll getting involved with the conspiracy theory that Senator Bob Brown was on about this morning. This is a government that are desperately clinging to any hope or prospect of retaining their reign, their seat of power, in this country—even though they have no agenda.