Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia is well and truly living beyond its means. In less than a generation, Labor and the coalition have effectively borrowed more than $1 trillion to fund their reckless spending. By 2006, the Howard government managed to virtually wipe out the debt accumulated under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Here we are 19 years later, and the Australian government's gross debt is now over $1 trillion. That's a one followed by 12 zeros, a thousand times a billion or a million times a million. It's more than 35 per cent of Australia's GDP.

Net debt costs Australia $27 billion a year in interest payments, while our total debt across the entire government sector costs us almost $50 billion a year in interest. It doesn't stop there. In the next three years, across the forward estimates, this gross debt is projected to grow by another $200 billion. If you ran your household this way, you'd lose your house. If you ran your business this way, you'd lose your business. You have to ask yourselves why you keep voting for them. Labor is robbing our great-grandchildren in a desperate bid to stay in power so they can heap another three years of misery and pain on the Australian people.

One Nation has identified $90 billion in wasteful spending that could be slashed from the budget. This will liberate the resources needed to provide genuine cost-of-living and tax relief totalling $40 billion to pay down our growing debt and invest in nation-building infrastructure for Australia's future prosperity.

Everything this government has touched has failed: climate change, the Voice, the housing scheme, immigration, the cost of living, economic stability and reform, and national security. Enough is enough. My message to the Australian people is: boot out this government with their Greens supporters, because they're the ones that are destroying this country, our standard of living and our way of life. They cannot manage money. Don't give them an open cheque for another three years. (Time expired)