Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That ideology is very flawed, and I hope that the member for Griffith will listen and learn as I speak. For what they fail to consider is, firstly, state government debt. The state government debt is currently about $250 billion and, on its current trajectory, in 15 years state government debt will actually be higher than Commonwealth government debt. If you include state government debt with Commonwealth government debt, our debt-to-GDP ratios do not look anywhere near as impressive as they otherwise would. What you also need to include is our current unfunded superannuation liabilities for public servants, which the previous Howard government set up the Future Fund to cover. Of course, since the Howard government left office in 2007, not one single cent has been put into that Future Fund from governments to pay for those growing unfunded superannuation liabilities. So we need to add that onto our debt to get an overall picture. Previously we did cover that in our debt, until that was changed by the Whitlam government in 1974.

The other thing we need to consider is our growing pension requirements as our population ages. We do not, as other countries do, put aside money and have pension funds. Our pensions are paid from concurrent revenue, so the pensions we pay to people this year are from the revenue that we raised this year. The problem we have is that, as we have an ageing population, our pension liabilities that we pay in future years will be greater and greater. When we weigh all these things up, we are facing a very difficult and dangerous future.

When we look at what the future will be it is important to consider not only the debt but also the interest rate that we pay on the debt. That is something that often gets forgotten about because, in Australia, our government pays one of the highest interest rates amongst all OECD countries on the money that we borrow. Most of the debt that the previous Labor government ran up was financed at rates between about three and four per cent. So on that debt today, this year's interest bill to the Australian public is $13.5 billion. That works out to about $562 for every man, woman and child in the country. When the previous government came to office that amount was zero. In fact, it was better than zero. The Commonwealth Treasury was actually receiving a billion dollars in interest every year on the money that the Howard-Costello governments had saved. Now we have $13.5 billion going out.

The real question will be: if we do not pay back in 10 years time the debt that Labor governments ran up over the last six years and address the trajectory we are on, what interest rate will we face in 10 years time? Will we be able to refinance that debt at the low rates of around three or four per cent—or even 2.5 per cent, as it is now? That brings me to a few comments made by the Governor of the Reserve Bank Governor when he warned about this at recent hearings of the economics committee. He was talking about the bond rates, on which we pay no interest. He said:

Somehow, at some point, I cannot help but feel that these very long rates that are literally as low as they have ever been recorded, ever, must someday be higher.

He continued:

Someday they have to be higher, especially given the amount of public debt which is on issue in so many countries around the world. But I cannot predict for you quite how that will come to pass, or when. My five-year horizon: surely they have to be higher.

Members of the opposition want to play a game of Russian roulette with our children's future by saying we can continue to spend this money, continue to run up this debt, spending $100 million-plus every single day and borrowing money from overseas—only for our children to have to pay an unknown interest rate in a decade's time.

What happens if bond yields go back to where the historic averages are, around seven per cent, and we keep increasing the debt? It will not be a cost of $560 per person. In a decade's time it could be $2,000 or more for every man, woman and child in this country—just to pay the interest on the debt. This is why we have urgency in bringing the budget back to at least a balance. And then we have got to run surpluses to pay that deficit down; otherwise we are stealing money from our children's future. We are condemning future generations of this nation to a lower standard of living if we do not act. Sadly, that is what members of the opposition are doing at the moment. That is what the Senate is doing as they continue to block bill after bill as we go about cleaning up Labor's mess. This is perhaps one of the greatest threats to our nation's future.

In the time remaining to me, I would like to speak about the other threat to our nation's future: the threat of Islamic State and the Islamic extremists. We need to recognise and to admit the true nature of the enemy we face. This is a group that is committed to the destruction of our freedom. It is committed to the destruction of the opportunities and rights—that have been fought for and won over the last century—that we give to women, and it is committed to the destruction of our prosperity.

We have seen recently, over the last week or fortnight—in fact, in the last 24 hours—the mass kidnapping of perhaps over 100 Christians in Syria. We saw the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot—a fellow Muslim. We have seen the mass murder of 21 Coptic men on a beach in Libya. This is a monstrous evil that I do not think any of us thought that we would see in our lifetime. Simply, we have a group of psychopaths that have declared war against the world. The question we need to ask ourselves as parliamentarians is: what should our response be to this growing threat? In considering what our response should be, we should perhaps reflect on a quote attributed to Martin Luther King, perhaps one of the greatest pacifists of all time. He is quoted as saying, 'If your enemy has a conscience, then follow Gandhi. But if your enemy has no conscience, like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.' That is, of course, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German clergyman who participated in a plot to kill Hitler. We have today a group, in ISIS, just as evil and just as barbarous as the Nazis were.

We need to use every resource at our disposal to fight this group. We cannot think that we can win this war that we are in through passivism and debating skills and sitting down and trying to have some kind of appeasement. Our history has shown that that has never worked. In thinking about the approach that we should take, I would like to quote a passage from The Wealth of Nations, a book by Adam Smith—perhaps one of the greatest books ever written. Smith wrote:

In modern war, the great expense of firearms gives an evident advantage to the nation which can best afford that expense; and, consequently, to an opulent and civilized, over a poor and barbarous nation. In ancient times, the opulent and civilized found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations. In modern times, the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilized. The invention of fire-arms, an invention which at first sight appears to be so pernicious, is certainly favourable, both to the permanency and to the extension of civilization.

If we are going to fight and defeat ISIS, we need to use every resource at our disposal. We need to realise that the danger to us is not from the arrogance of Western power but from our unpreparedness or our unwillingness to use the military resources at our disposal to defeat this group. To quote retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, 'Retreat, retrenchment, and disarmament are historically a recipe for disaster.

In the last few minutes I would like to add some comments about the issues here in our Australian society. We cannot allow, under the guise of multiculturalism, groups in Australia that currently enjoy all the benefits of our free and open society and what they have delivered but at the very same time seek to undermine and reject our free and open society. The price of admission to our nation is to accept our values, as it is said in our citizenship ceremony—which our Prime Minister has often quoted:

I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

We have seen people who are not willing to uphold our laws and are not willing to respect the rights and liberties of this country. We have seen that in the shameful issue of child marriage—a complete abuse of human rights. It is a practice that threatens young girls' lives, their health and their future prospects and robs them of their childhood.

Last week we heard the most shocking story about a 12-year-old girl who was forced into a child marriage and who became pregnant and miscarried in a hospital in Western Sydney—a most shocking case. We heard another case only yesterday of a 15-year-old girl who was forced into a child marriage. We need to crack down on this. We need to make it crystal clear that child marriage in Australia is completely unacceptable. (Time expired)

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