Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Acting Deputy President, let me give a little history lesson in relation to the structural deficit. Do you know who brought the structural deficit in? The Howard government brought the structural deficit in, and Peter Costello was too weak and too jelly-backed to do anything about it. He was one of the weakest political operatives we have ever seen in the Treasury in this country, but maybe that will be superseded by the current Treasurer. He was too weak to actually deal with the structural deficit; he left a structural deficit of huge proportions. You then have to look at how you deal with these reports. The Peter Costello report of 2012 said that we were living beyond our means. That was not very original at all. When you have a weak former Treasurer, who left a structural deficit, trying to tell Queensland how they should run their economy, then I think you have a problem. The problem is that you run with the same old arguments.

I am sure we will hear the same old arguments. There was an inadequate financial analysis in the report, but does that actually surprise anyone? When you have an inadequate former Treasurer doing an audit on a state, you get an inadequate outcome. What does it mean? It means you get a push to destroy jobs in Queensland—20,000 Public Service jobs in Queensland. These are decent people trying to bring their families up, and they were just dismissed by the coalition in this country. The conservatives think Public Servants are simply a figure to be dismissed; they are not human beings with families, with debts, with problems and issues they have to deal with. They are simply a number; they are simply a tool to try to reduce the bottom line of coalition governments.

You will no doubt see much of this under the coalition's Commission of Audit—bad analysis, analysis that is based on ideology and not the facts. That is what we are going to see in this Commission of Audit. It will be laid out to try and deliver the coalition's agenda, which is to weaken collective bargaining in this country, to reduce the role of government, to give markets a free hand to do what they like. Then we will end up with another smaller equivalent of the global financial crisis in this country, because the market is running the show. That is not good for this country and it is not appropriate. We certainly should not have any faith that this Commission of Audit will do other than deliver on the ideology and the policy parameters that have been laid out.

The Business Council of Australia is already telling the coalition what they want them to do, and that is smaller government, fewer payments, no dealing with intergenerational issues—just let it rip. If you look at the BCA report, it says that without policy change Australia will reach a combined annual deficit of five per cent of GDP across Commonwealth and state governments by 2050. But a policy change from the coalition is about ripping away at health, ripping away at welfare and ripping away at education. That is the policy position from the coalition. It is not our policy position to do that. We will look after this country in a substantial way. You are just— (Time expired)