Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to address this MPI today on budget chaos, which we inherited from previous Labor governments. I start by taking the member for Charlton to task a bit that we 'don't mention the global financial crisis'. The Rudd government was not the first government to experience external shocks. In 1997 Peter Costello and the Howard government had to deal with the Asian financial meltdown. In 2001 we had the dotcom crash. So governments in the past have certainly had to deal with external shocks. On the point about the global financial crisis, in conjunction with that we saw a massive boom out of China. Through the period that the previous Labor government handed down massive deficits we had the best terms of trade this country has seen in 100 years. I want to put that into perspective, at the start.

If you want to talk about budget chaos, I have a long list of achievements by the previous government. We all know them, but I will run through them because they do deserve a mention: pink batts; school halls; the previous Treasurer, Mr Swan, standing at the dispatch box predicting that the next four budgets would all be in surplus; and the mining tax was announced, which had massive spending initiatives attached and ended up raising very little revenue and had to be adjusted eight times, before they finally came to the wrong conclusion.

There are others that do not get mentioned often. One of these is the $1.8 billion fringe benefits tax, which led to almost immediate job losses in the car and other retail sectors. Cash for clunkers is another absolute beauty. And there is GroceryWatch. Probably the daddy of them all is the NBN, which was put together on the back of an envelope on a VIP jet on the way to Darwin. That is a project—

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