Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Unfortunately, you will have to bear the legacy of that. Let me come to what we will see in this upcoming year. The government have made a number of statements about their plans to address the structural deficit, a structural deficit that we know has increased dramatically under this government. What does this mean though when they say they are going to address the structural deficit? What does this mean when the Prime Minister says that she will—with her Treasurer in the upcoming budget—deliver a budget that is centred around Labor values? I will tell you what it means. It means that this government is planning to increase taxes yet again. Not satisfied with their raids on superannuation, not satisfied with their raids on private health insurance, the government is going to go back to the Australian people and reach into their pocket and take out their hard earned dollars to pay for their fiscal competence. That is what we can expect. The reason we can expect that is that this government has made more than $120 billion of promises which are completely and utterly unfunded. Not one dollar has been accounted for. Not one dollar is actually in the budget. And this is before you count what is already off the books: the NBN, which at last count is upwards of $50 billion, according to some estimates; and the 'Bob Brown bank', the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the green fund, at over $10 billion. In fact, we are in the bizarre situation now where we are borrowing money to give it away to failed energy entrepreneurs, because they cannot get financing from anywhere else, in the hope that this will somehow deliver a benefit.

I do not know about you, but I think to borrow money to do this does not sound like a wise idea, and it is certainly not something that the coalition will support in government. Instead we are going to repay debt, because we know that only in repaying debt and repaying the borrowings will we stop paying the very high interest bill which is now around $7 billion a year. That is $7 billion a year which, according to the Productivity Commission, is more than enough, combined with state and federal funding, to cover the annual funding of the National Disability Insurance Scheme which this government professes to hold deep in its heart as something it wishes to achieve.

First they need to get our economy back in order. They need to get our economy back in order and Treasurer Wayne Swan is most certainly not the person to do that. He has been condemned by his own words and by the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who has belled the cat on his incompetence, most recently in relation to the mining tax. Treasurer Swan should do the honourable thing and resign for the benefit of all Australians.

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