Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I may have just entered high school that year. I am pretty sure it was 1989 and that was my first year in high school. Wyatt Roy may not have been with us then, but I was in high school the last time the Labor Party delivered a surplus. Senator O'Sullivan was but a young man in that generation when the Labor Party last delivered a surplus.

Politics is about choices: our plan for the future, our plan to grow the economy, to stimulate small business and support families, and to try to bring the budget under control. This is critical and this is an issue of fairness. This is a moral issue. Borrowing from your grandchildren or your children to fund your lifestyle—and the kind of profligate spending we saw under the Labor Party—is absolutely immoral.

Senator Wright interjecting—

We have an interjection from the Greens. Have the Greens ever come up with a savings measure? They take the Labor Party view that a savings measure is, in fact, a new tax. They certainly do support new taxes—but it would not matter how many new taxes you came up with for the Greens, they would always find more ways of spending that money, more ways of throwing that money away. That is a moral issue. You would lumber generations to come with debt and deficit to pay for your lifestyle, to pay for ridiculous spending, to pay for the ridiculous schemes we saw under that Labor-Greens government. So we are not going to take lectures from the Greens. The Greens have the craziest of economic policies. They have no economic credibility.