Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

About seven years ago, when the Labor Party took office, having won the election in November 2007, they inherited the best books, the best set of national accounts ever inherited by any incoming government in our national history. In 113 years of our national history, they received the best accounts ever with billions and billions of dollars in the bank. When we took over government in September last year, we received the worst national accounts in the history of our nation. They received the best; we received the worst and now we are trying to fix them. The horror is not that Labor spent too much on overpriced school halls, the cash splash and the disastrous pink batts; it is that so many of them do not believe there is a problem at all.

It gets worse. They are even, at the moment, sabotaging the government's attempts to repay the debt. We want to do that, and it is being sabotaged. We do know that they have no plan to solve the problem. No plan has been put forward by 'barnacle' Bill Shorten—Mr Shorten—at all. The problem now is not the amount of the debt but the trajectory of the debt. In just over nine years it will reach $667 billion with $3 billion a month in interest. What could we do with that? That is the point.

It gets much worse than that, and this has not been raised in this place. In the history of developing countries, since World War II, no-one has ever repaid a debt of that magnitude. What will happen is that we will become like western Europe and the United States and we will never repay it. We either repay it now or we are a country that is stuck with systemic debt, just like western Europe and the United States. And we will be paying billions of dollars in interest for the privilege. It will become a permanent fixture in our public life. The government will become the centre of the economy—just as Kevin Rudd wished all those years ago.

The Labor Party profess to be the party of social justice. They have this sort of sense about them that they are the party of social justice—with a touch of moral vanity, I might add. They have argued since May that the budget is not fair for pensioners, students and working families. That is what they say: 'it is not fair'. But I will tell you who it is not fair for. It is not fair for the people who will have to pay the debt. The government believe that this generation should live within their means. We believe that the health, the education and the welfare of our community should be paid for by the community—not by our children and not by our grandchildren. That is the disgrace of a party that talks about social justice and equality: they do not give a damn about our children and our grandchildren. It is not only fiscally reckless but also morally contemptible. But there is a reason for it. The Labor Party know that our children and those yet to be born, of course, cannot vote. They know that. We are standing up for people who cannot yet vote. This lot will never, ever do that. They will put more and more money on the credit card, because they know there are very, very few repercussions of that. Every democratic incentive is not to pay back the debt, because when you pay back debt it causes electoral pain. I accept that; we all accept that. We are paying it back because it is fiscally responsible and morally it is the only way to go.

We believe, ultimately, that if pensioners, working families and students think the government is that poor, they will throw us out. That is fine. That is democracy. But what the Labor Party believe and know is this: those who will pay Labor's debt cannot yet vote. They cannot throw the Labor Party out because they cannot yet vote. It is a gutless approach to politics—one that has been adopted by nearly every country in western Europe, including Greece, Portugal, France and Spain, because the politicians of those nations did not have the guts to pay back the debt and they wanted future generations to pay for today's living standards. And that is the solution of the Australian Labor Party. I can put up with the fact that the Labor Party cannot manage a budget. That is a fact.