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

The Australian people just got a small insight there as to why they should be very scared of the potential Labor-Green minority government in the next few months, because these guys over there, the Greens, don't understand basic economics, they don't understand basic finances and they don't understand the difference between wealth and income. What we just heard there is that they are going to put a tax on billionaires. I don't even know if their figures are exactly correct, but let's say they're right. I'm going to accept their figures that there are 150 with $600 billion in wealth. If they're going to tax them at 10 per cent and take $60 billion, that's a wealth tax. They'll get $60 billion or so for that, and that's apparently going to fund their dental plan, which is costed over four years at $50 billion, I just heard.

What do we do at the end of the four years? Once you tax the billionaires, you have no billionaires left, or they have much less wealth. This plan is a plan to fund it for only a few years. That doesn't provide any income over time. It simply takes the wealth that we have today to fund something very temporary and leaves the bills for future Australians going forward. This is not a plan. This is a slogan, something that the Greens specialise in because they don't really have a sustainable plan for our country.

The sustainable plan for our country to deliver public services is to make sure we continue to create companies and businesses that produce much wealth going forward. We need billions of dollars of wealth to be created every year to fund the public services we have here in this country. We have just been through this experience with the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It was costed originally at just $16 billion, and that was in gross terms. There was some state funding included in that figure. Today, it's costing the budget almost $50 billion, and it's projected to go to over $80 billion at the end of this decade. That was an example of where we haven't planned very well, and it's putting an enormous strain on our budget, our economy and our labour market because we haven't planned for it correctly. We made some mistakes there, clearly, that have to be fixed up.

It is easy, of course, to promise everybody better public services, new public services and free public services, but I don't take the costings of the Greens with any grain of salt. I don't care who's done them, because lots of those bodies costed the NDIS and got that wrong. We need to be very careful about that. If we're going to fund something like this, we also need to make sure that on the other side of the ledger we have a sustainable revenue stream that can fund it, otherwise we are going to bankrupt this nation. We've been riding high the last couple of years, and it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency with a couple of years of budget surpluses, which have come almost exclusively on the back of a massive mining boom, bigger than what we experienced in the late 2000s and early 2010s. What we've had since the Ukraine war is the biggest trade boom in our history. That has delivered a temporary, illusionary surplus for the Commonwealth budget, but in the years to come—it's starting this year—the deficits are going to grow bigger and bigger every year. Our debt is already at very high levels post-COVID, and we need to be very careful with what we spend.

I hope, God willing—let's pray—that the Greens political party do not get control of the finance benches in a few months time. This is a small window—this is just one of their policies; they've got even more crazy stuff out there—into how they would destroy this nation's finances, and the only way they'll get anywhere close to doing that is if the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is in a position to form a minority government. There's no way, of course, the Greens will agree to form government with us or with Mr Peter Dutton, but they very well could. But I know they're licking their lips at forming government with the Labor Party. These little asks here are just the precursor for the negotiations that are to come with the Australian Labor Party.

Whatever Labor senators say right now you can totally discount. No matter what they say before an election, they will completely change their tune if an alliance with the Greens is the difference between them staying over there and coming over here. If they need to agree with the Australian Greens to stay over there on the government benches, they'll sign away their mother-in-law, maybe even their mum, because they want to stay in government. They'll be desperate to stay in government. You can't trust them right now. The only way to avoid a Labor-Greens government is to not vote for the Labor Party. That's it. If you don't want that chaos, that destruction of our finances, do not vote for the federal Labor Party at the next federal election.