Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It does take some responsibility. It also takes some energy and effort to make sure we take the Australian people with us in the decisions we take.

I need infrastructure in my rural and outer-urban electorate, whether it be the baseball club or the cricket club, the tennis club or the football club. We are in a massively growing area. I have had more than 20,000 new residents come into my area over the last 18 months. Their children all need facilities, be it for soccer—which is one of the great growing sports in my community—baseball, or other sports we have not heard of like indoor slide ball. There are all sorts of things. Some 1,800 people a day go through our sports and aquatics centre, mostly for basketball. All of them could do with extended facilities.

There are bridges in my electorate that need rebuilding, either after fires or because of the fact we now have B-double trucks travelling over bridges that were never designed for that. I have one of the strongest agricultural areas in the nation—the great provider of much of the milk, beef and lamb you consume; the great provider of the wool that is exported and of the manufacturing across Gippsland. We contribute the power out of the Latrobe Valley that runs the nation—and I have fantastic workers there—but we do understand as a people that we cannot live beyond our means.

Politicians in this House and Senate collectively are letting you down because they are not telling you the truth about the nation's finances and where we are headed, what we need to pay for and the infrastructure we need to grow this country. I am not talking about just those listing to this broadcast today; I am talking about their children and their children. We need to have politicians in this nation prepared to project 30 years and see where we are going to be. We need to have politicians in this nation not making promises that we cannot afford and not making promises about what they are going to deliver but never delivering.

We have to be reasonable with our statements and honest with the Australian people and say: 'Today is a time when we have to pull back.' Our national income has been diminished. You did not do it, I did not do it, the Labor Party did not do it and the coalition did not do it. There is a downturn in our earnings. If there was a downturn in the earnings in my businesses I had to stop the spending I was doing throughout the household. We never had to lay off people, which was fantastic. There were people who left, but we did not have to lay anybody off. We went without. This nation at this time has to change the way it is interacting with the Australian people. We need a new conversation to explain exactly the situation we are in and how we need to address it. I expect in the May budget that that will be the case.

It does no good for the Labor Party to stand there speech after speech denying the past completely and denying their hand in the state of the economy today. They are completely denying their hand and saying: 'It is nothing to do with us. The election was the cut-off date. It is a new day today. All the things we said we would cut we are no longer cutting. We do not believe that any more. Anyway, it was the other executive who cut it. We are the new opposition.' To this point I say to the Australian people: not one plan has been put forward by the Labor Party as to how they would address the economic ills of this nation. They have only said, 'We do not like the way you are doing it.' They have the right to say that but they do not have the right to stay completely silent on what plan they would have for the nation.

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