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

I would like to make a bit of an analogy not only about this debate on News South Wales Senior Week but about many things in society today. Imagine that a rogue tenant moves into a house. The house is neatly maintained, the gardens are nicely kept, the kitchen is clean and the house is tidy. The rogue tenant spends six years there and absolutely trashes the place. After six years of trashing the place he sets fire to it, barricades the door and goes and sits in the gutter on the other side of the road, where he watches on as the fire brigade turns up. As the fire brigade goes in and knocks the door down and goes in to try to put the fire out, the rogue tenant stands there and harps and criticises and nags from the sidelines, complaining about the damage that is being done to the carpet, the water damage, the damage they are doing with their muddy boots.

Well, that analogy is exactly what is happening in this debate. The Labor Party of this country trashed this nation's finances, and the greatest expenditure that the government now has—the fastest-rising expenditure—is interest on government debt: $13.5 billion needs to be found from the taxes raised from the citizens of this country simply to pay the interest on the debt. The nation is currently spending 10 per cent more than we are raising. That is completely unsustainable, because it means that every dollar of deficit is a dollar that we steal from future generations of this country, and it is currently 10 per cent. It simply means that young people, children who are yet to be born, will have a higher tax burden and a lower standard of living unless we get that budget back into balance and then slowly pay off this debt. Yet every time we put forward a sensible measure to try to bring the budget back into balance we hear this narking, whining and harping from the opposition with absolutely no alternate policies.

There is also the hypocrisy of this motion from the people on the other side of this chamber who came in here and held up the repeal of the carbon tax for over nine months. After we saw that repeal we saw the largest fall in electricity prices in our nation's history. They not only introduced the carbon tax, but they also voted against its repeal twice. We know as sure as night follows day that they will bring it back. Should they ever get the chance, they will bring it back. They will give it another name, and they will slug pensioners, older Australians and all Australians with higher electricity prices.

We should look at what their previous policies did in increasing electricity prices for the most hard-up in this country. In New South Wales alone, between 2009 and 2013, there was a doubling of the number of households that had their electricity cut off. In fact, in the last year of the carbon tax there were 33,000 households that had their electricity cut off, and yet the members on the other side voted to continue with that carbon tax.

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