Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I return to some of the points that the Assistant Treasurer made in answer to my question on what additional information the Greens had achieved in relation to debt reporting. I think a reasonable summary, essentially, is that they have achieved a consolidation of what is already on the public record so it makes it easier for people to find. But there are a number of comments that Assistant Treasurer made which I think are worth exploring. Of course the context of this debate is that we have a government who campaigned on reducing debt who are now saying we should have unlimited debt in this country. They have proffered no sensible rationale for that and they certainly have not provided the Australian people nor the Senate and the parliament with an indication of what their current numbers are and why we need, first, such a massive increase of a couple of hundred billion dollars in the debt ceiling and, now, the removal of any limit whatsoever.

They have not agreed to that, they have not agreed to provide any of that information and, as importantly, they have done a deal with the Australian Greens, the people they regard as economic fringe-dwellers, in order to achieve no debt limit in this country. If you had written this last year in the context of the pre-election campaign and the campaign proper, I do not think anyone would have believed it. If you had said Joe Hockey—the man who says: 'The country is drowning in debt. We have to reduce debt. The solution to debt is not more debt,' all the things Joe Hockey beat his chest about—would do a deal with the Australian Greens to remove any debt limit, after asking the parliament to increase the debt limit by $200 billion, I guarantee Joe Hockey would have denied it. He would have said, 'That's a ridiculous proposition and I guarantee it'll never happen.' It has happened.

More important than the hypocrisy on display are some of the reasons of the coalition government, after campaigning against debt, for wanting no limit on debt. The minister said some interesting things in answer to my earlier question. He said, 'We've got to remove the debate from the fact of debt to the reasons for it and the type of debt; what debt is being used for.' That may well be a sensible policy proposition. The difficulty is that is precisely the opposite of what was told to the Australian people before the election. The Australian people were told by this coalition that all debt is bad. We had that from Mr Hockey, who is very good, I have to say, very hairy-chested, on the rhetoric, but pretty soft when it comes to being rolled by the National Party on foreign investment.

Unfortunately there has been an overcompensation now, which is not unusual from someone who is too weak and gets rolled so then overcompensates on something else. We have seen the overcompensation in the backgrounding of senior ministers to the media on the auto industry. It was an extraordinary display of disunity, but more importantly on economic irresponsibility, to have that the subject of backgrounding. I digress; I will talk on that point another time.

The minster talked about using debt for different objectives. It is important to note that despite being so anti-debt before the election and being relentless in criticism of the Labor government for sensible borrowings keeping the Australian economy going through stimulus spending to ensure Australia came through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression in better shape than almost any other advanced economy, there is now a discussion by ministers, including the minister in the chamber, about more debt and other debt. Apparently there is good debt and bad debt, and good debt appears to be debt the coalition go into while bad debt appears to be debt a Labor government incurs. I noticed, for example, that Mr Hockey in October looked at ways to stimulate growth. He looked at identifying government borrowings raised to fund infrastructure as separate from debt. Mr Briggs talked about leveraging the government balance sheet, which can mean a couple of things. It can mean guaranteeing debt or borrowing more. We have had the Treasurer flagging higher infrastructure spending funded by government borrowing. There have also been a number of comments—including from Senator Sinodinos today.

It may be, Senator Sinodinos, that there is an economic justification for what you are proposing. It may be that there is an economic rationale for increased government borrowings to fund infrastructure. But you should be upfront with the Australian people about that. What you are asking this parliament—and I regret the Greens are going along with it—is to say: 'We're going to give you unlimited access to debt but—guess what—we're not going to tell you what it's used for. We are not going to tell you what we are borrowing and we are not going to tell you how much we are going to borrow to fund infrastructure, we are not going to tell you when you vote on this what we are going to use it for. I ask this question: have the Australian Greens been briefed on what debt financing or what government borrowings for infrastructure funding the government is proposing?