Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Fine. Let's go back a few years, as Senator Cameron highlighted, to when the Greens supported raising the debt ceiling. In 2013 the government came to us and asked whether we would support raising the debt ceiling. It's very important to put this in context. That was a time when we had a so-called debt-and-deficit crisis in this country. That was a time when we had the zombie budget cuts and the Commission of Audit, which was looking at slashing expenditure everywhere—GP co-payments, education, hospital funding, you name it. That was a time when, more than any time I've been in the Senate, we needed to have the debate about debt and why debt is not a dirty word. Servicing debt is the issue, not the total amount of debt; it's the ability to repay and service the debt. I would've picked Senator Cameron as being a Keynesian until today. Getting up here and talking about cutting debt and cutting deficit—that's exactly what I heard from Senator Cormann. It's exactly what I heard from our previous Treasurer, Mr Joe Hockey. And it is really disappointing to hear Labor peddling the same mantra in this place about debt and deficit.

All debt is not bad. We have had a mature debate in this place, over the last 18 months, about good debt and bad debt, and the Greens have led this debate in the last few years. Debt, if spent correctly—if it's invested in education, health care and a social safety net—has a lot of benefits for our country. Debt, if it's for long-term, productivity-enhancing infrastructure spending, can not only create jobs; it can also have a lot of benefits for our country that go beyond simple neoclassical economics. Over nearly 18 months, I chaired a select inquiry into debt financing and the infrastructure gap in this country. We produced an excellent report, talking about why we should spend more money—more debt, capital spending, good debt—on long-term projects and have the infrastructure revolution that we need in this country.

There is a gap of hundreds of billions—possibly, depending on who you speak to, even trillions—of dollars in infrastructure financing and spending in this country, money that we could be spending to create jobs and to futureproof our communities. This is something that the Greens have argued. So, if we're going to talk about debt, let's go beyond the simple hard-right, conservative, neoliberal agenda and talk about why we need debt, how we service it, where it's spent and why we need that investment in our communities, our people and our economy. Then we can have a sensible debate about debt. I totally understand that debt is something that needs to be serviced and we need to have the ability to do that. If you want to have a look at a report that talks about a totally new way of financing debt and infrastructure spending in this country then go to that select inquiry into infrastructure financing.

I've got to say, I was very proud, in 2016, during the double-dissolution election, that my party, the Greens, took an excellent initiative on setting up a government owned infrastructure bank. If I remember rightly, Labor had a similar version, which I think they might have called the 'concrete bank', which used $10 billion of public funding to better spend on infrastructure. We went a lot further than that. We estimated we needed at least $80 billion of new long-term infrastructure spending, and we put up a structure to finance and fund that spending—a publicly owned infrastructure bank. In the same way, I'm very proud that we've also put up a structure for a publicly owned bank—a retail bank—recently, which we'll continue to prosecute. These are ideas that will work, and these are ideas that I have no doubt will be taken up again in the future.

All debt is not bad. Debt is not a dirty word. Let's go beyond this hard-right, conservative, neoliberal agenda of talking about debt in that way. I am disappointed that the Labor Party, especially Senator Cameron, have come in here today and peddled that mantra.

Question negatived.