Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator O'Neill, you are complaining about cuts to the foreign aid, but that is exactly what you did in your last budget—it may have been in your second last budget, 2012-13. You cut $2.9 billion from the foreign aid budget in that year and now you come in here, with no sign of hypocrisy, and sanctimoniously say, 'Oh, isn't it terrible that we're not spending more money on foreign aid.' You did it! You did it two years ago. It is unfortunate that we cannot give more money to the people overseas who need it, but we cannot give it because of the spending decisions you made when you were in government. You wasted billions and billions of dollars. We heard in question time from Senator Cash that in just one area we wasted $11 billion on processing offshore arrivals—a problem that was created entirely by the policies of the Australian Labor Party.

Wouldn't it have been nice to have had $11 billion to spend on services for disabled children? Wouldn't it have been nice to not have to cut our foreign aid budget as much as we have had to do if we had had that $11 billion? But you did that. And we cannot get that money back now; we have to pay it back. We have to pay it back to those overseas whom we borrowed money from—to the Chinese government, to oil barons in the Middle East. That is who we borrowed money from. All that money that you wasted has to be repaid now. Unfortunately, that means that we cannot fund all of the things that we would like to do, including in the disabled space, the health space and the education space.