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

Waste, mismanagement and reckless spending are part of Labor's DNA. But this proposal takes the cake.They are so desperate to get the cash out of the door that they are doing away with any part of the most basic parliamentary processes, the part of our job actually, of scrutinising the activities and performance of executive government. The Greens, under the leadership of their new leader Senator Milne, are now coming into this chamber and making themselves complicit with the executive government to prosecute a complete abuse of power in pushing this cash splash through the parliament without proper parliamentary scrutiny. It is an absolute disgrace. People across Australia should take note that this government completely disrespects taxpayers' dollars and has absolutely no regard for spending money carefully and wisely and living within its means. And of course the Australian Greens are right next to them, side-by-side, aiding and abetting the cash splash, the waste of money and the reckless spending which has become the hallmark of this bad Labor government.

This government has promised for some years now that it will deliver a surplus budget in 2012. This morning Bill Shorten, the Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, was at a breakfast saying, 'We have delivered a surplus. The surplus is here.' Let me say to the Australian people that this government has not delivered a surplus; this government has promised a surplus. It will never deliver a surplus because, when all is said and done, in September 2012, when we look at their past track record, no doubt we will be back in deficit. No number of accounting tricks will hide the fact that this government is trying to achieve a surplus through some sort of dodgy budget of magic. I say to the Labor Party and the Greens: shifting spending from 2012-13 to 2011-12 is not a spending cut. Shifting funding or spending from 2012-13 in the 2011-12 is cooking the books in order to make it look as though there is going to be a surplus in 2013. Everybody knows what you are up to. Everybody knows what you are doing.

Over the last four years this government has given us $176 billion worth of accumulated deficits. This government does not know how to look after money. People across Australia know that the Labor Party never knows how to manage money. The Labor Party in government always stuffs up our public finances. The people across Australia know that it always comes down to the coalition to fix up the Labor mess after a number of years of Labor government. The only thing that is worse now than before is that the Labor Party together with the Greens now have a majority in this place which means they can at will just ram any bad piece of legislation through this parliament. This is absolutely not in the national interest, and I am sure people across Australia would be appalled to realise that this government is ramming $420 million worth of spending through this parliament without any proper scrutiny whatsoever.

Let us reflect on what this is about, on what we have been asked to look at very quickly. We are talking about the government wanting to borrow money so they can give it away. This is not money they have; this is money they are going to borrow so that they can give it away. They are going to give it away without any strings attached. They are going to call it the education bonus that there is no requirement to spend on anything remotely related to education. This can be spent on anything. This is just a complete cash splash. This does not even have to be spent on schoolchildren. In fact, we know that the schoolchildren of Australia will be asked to repay the debt this government has accumulated, with interest. This government have given us deficit after deficit and have taken us from a position of no government net debt to a position where we are now heading for $145 billion of government net debt. The government are spending nearly $30 billion on interest to service the debt they have accumulated, interest payments that will be a burden for generations of children for years to come. It is this Labor-Greens government which is to blame. These processes, without proper parliamentary scrutiny and ramming through yet another Labor Party cash splash, is not the way we in the Senate should be doing business.