Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You would think that you were joking. You would assume that you were joking, but this was the one that was drawn up on the back of a beer coaster. We would laugh about and it would be amusing, but here is a $29 billion blow-out, and, sadly, we have to repair the damage this has done to our economy. You would think that when something like that has happened—the beer coaster and the $29 billion blow-out—that when it came to the savings they had put forward, they would say in opposition, 'We do have some moral responsibility to try to fix this.' But all we have seen from those opposite is that they are happy to completely run away from the moral responsibility that they have to help us try to fix the nation's finances.

There was the $11 billion blow-out on border protection. It is going to be very interesting to see where the ALP end up on border protection at their national conference. I am going to be looking forward to hearing the debate that takes place to see whether we are likely to see Labor adopt the policies that have worked and been implemented by the coalition government—and that have seen us save money when it comes to border protection—or whether they will want to, once again, put in place those policies that will lead to a further $11 billion blow-out on border protection, the like of which we saw during the six years they were in government.

There was the $7 billion spent on school halls. We all saw that program writ large and the very public failures of rolling out that program. I will never forget, in my home town of Hamilton, visiting a school where $80,000, approximately, had been spent on portaloos because the first part of the building knocked down was the toilets. So they had to bring portaloos in for 12 months at a cost of $80,000. Once again, when you hear of these things you would think that they have a moral responsibility to try to address these issues and say 'We erred here. We got it wrong.' But there does not seem to be any sense of that from the other side. They seem to be all care and no responsibility. They ran up this enormous tab, and it is someone else's problem now.

There was the $2.8 billion on pink batts. I will not go into the very sad circumstances around that. Once again, you would think that, given what we saw with the pink batts, and the very tragic outcomes from that, there would be a moral responsibility from those on the other side to say, 'Yes, once again, we did err. We rushed the implementation of this program. We didn't take due care in how we should've rolled it out and there were sad consequences.' But we have heard nothing.

Then, of course, there was the other tragic waste of money, which was the $900 cheques. Forty eight thousand $900 cheques were sent to Australians who were either dead or overseas. This was Labor's stimulus program—48,000 $900 cheques to either dead people or those living overseas. I suppose that some of those oversees who got the $900 cheques might have decided, 'I'll send it back so that it will stimulate the Australian economy,' but I think they would be pretty few and far between.

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