Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a pleasure to follow Senator Cameron in a debate after question time. However, I got the sense that Senator Cameron's heart was not quite in it this afternoon. I got the sense that there was a touch of mock outrage, because I think back to the days when we were on the other side of the chamber, and I recall the days when he voted for higher fuel taxes. I recall the days when Senator Cameron voted for a carbon tax that was going to include transport fuels. I recall those days in the first debate over the CPRS. I recall those days when Labor breached its profound commitment to the Australian people and voted to impose a carbon tax at the behest of the fringe Greens in the corner of this chamber. So Senator Cameron did not quite have his heart in attacking the government over this today.

Just once, I am sure all my Liberal and National colleagues would enjoy coming to office and not having to fix a mess inherited from the Labor Party. Just once, we would like to come to office and find the pot of gold that Labor always seems to find upon arriving in office. Just once we would like to come to office and, rather than giving the electorate the truth—the bad news—about the mess that has been inherited and the sacrifices that will need to be made, we would like to have a little bit of money in the kitty to undertake a few new initiatives.

In my short period of being involved in politics, I saw the Kennett government elected in 1992 with the disaster that was bequeathed them by Victorian Labor run by Joan Kirner and John Cain, and the tragedy of very difficult budgets and funding cuts, and the decisions that had to be made by a government to put a state back on its feet and, quite frankly, avoid the state falling into bankruptcy.

I remember the Howard government coming to office in 1996 with an unsustainable deficit, and debt that had peaked at a high level—and, as I am sure someone on the other side will point out, technically a higher level than now, although not increasing as quickly as debt was under the former Labor Party. Then in comparison there was the Labor Party coming to office in 2007 with one of the best fiscal circumstances in the world—with tens of billions of dollars in the bank to cover superannuation liabilities mainly invented by former minister Clyde Cameron when he put so many public servants onto high salaries and into defined benefit superannuation schemes for which no money had been put aside. That was all put aside in the Future Fund. And tens of billions of dollars in surpluses were also put aside for investments in higher education and health. Yet the Labor Party came to office and blew all of that.

The Labor Party came to office and what do we have to show as a nation? We have Senator Conroy sitting in the chamber here with the NBN to nowhere that has cost billions of dollars but served so few people, and that froze investment in new estates all around our country so that people buying new houses were screaming out for services that people in older suburbs could take for granted.

Yet now we have the Labor Party coming in here and complaining about a measure that was announced in the budget—and a mechanism that was used by them in a particularly nasty tax grab on younger Australians to increase the alcohol tax on a particular type of drink, hidden behind the veil of a health measure, which we know did not achieve any of the health objectives it set out to achieve. It just wanted to target young Australians.

When we came to office this government was borrowing money to pay the interest bill accumulated in five budgets of the other side. The other side will say that we do not have that serious a debt problem in Australia, but we had the second fastest growth in debt in the developed world. If those opposite would like to stand and say that there is nothing wrong with our budget situation, the Australian people will judge them on that. Our budget situation is unsustainable in the mechanism that was inherited from those opposite, because when you add all the other liabilities the Commonwealth has, and when you add the liabilities of the state and local governments, the Australian taxpayer is nowhere near as safe and secure as those opposite might have you believe.

This measure is a small one that will cost the average household between 30 and 40 cents a week over the next four years. It will support the balancing of the budget and an investment program that will improve the quality of life and the productivity of the economy. The people will not buy the mock outrage of those opposite.