John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is exactly right—I will take your interjection, Senator Edwards. We are out there to fix their mess. That is a thing that we have to do all the time: fix their mess—especially the financial mess they left us in, as they have done for all of my life. Ever since I left school at the end of 1972, whenever there is a Labor government and then they are thrown out of government, how are the books? The books are terrible! How is the bank account? The bank account is empty! How is the overdraft? The overdraft is bigger!

That is the history right throughout of Labor governments' management of money, whether it be at a state level—from Victoria to South Australia to New South Wales to Western Australia to Tasmania—or a federal level. The Hawke-Keating government left $96 billion of debt at the end of their era in 1996. Who cleaned up the mess? The coalition government of course, under John Howard as Prime Minister and Peter Costello as Treasurer. The challenge we have now is to clean up your financial mess—almost $350 billion of debt as of last Friday—and here we are trying to put our budget back together so that we have money to spend on very important issues like defence, but you will not help us to get our budget in order.