Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise also to speak on this very important matter of public importance raised by the Leader of the Nationals—and I follow his very good remarks earlier—about the failure of this government to provide a credible plan to ensure Australia’s economic recovery. What we have heard during question time over the last few days has been quite extraordinary. We hear it on the doors; it is all part of the Hollowmen’s script that has been sent out by the Prime Minister’s office on what they need to say this week leading to the Leader of the Opposition’s speech in reply tonight. It has been about exactly what the debt number is and exactly what the spending cuts we, the opposition, would implement that the government of course could not.

The problem with that is that these guys have no credibility on election promises and they have no credibility on their detail. Remember, this was the Prime Minister who, when he was Leader of the Opposition, stood in front of a TV camera and said, ‘I am an economic conservative.’ What a joke! Within 18 months, he has turned around and written a 7,500-word diatribe about how he is a socialist. We are not going to sit here and listen to these people tell us what we should and should not do this evening. This budget is about this government making a very bad situation even worse. I could not describe the lack of planning to get out of this situation better than Michael Stutchbury from the Australian today. He said:

The first hint that Wayne Swan does not have a credible plan to return the budget to surplus came in what he didn’t say. The Treasurer’s budget speech did not mention he was delivering Australia’s biggest budget deficit since World War II.

Of course he did not say that. He did not say the number—he cannot bring himself to say the number. I was interested to see the member for Wakefield following his remarks and it was good to see, for once, that the member for Wakefield did not go into personal derogatory attacks. It was nice that he was able to focus on some issues for a short period of time. We are used to the Right of the Labor Party—the member for Kingston excepted—who always go for the personal attacks rather than focusing on the issues. I will just go off the topic for a second and mention the Right of the Labor Party in South Australia have been quiet recently. Their golden boy has had a few issues with speeding fines—but we have moved on from that.

In the last few days we have seen a government that has completely lost control of the budget. It is the biggest-spending government in the history of our nation, as the member of Aston quite rightly pointed out. It confirms that, because of Labor’s reckless spending policies, we now face the biggest budget deficit in our history. It confirms that, within the space of the first term of this government, Australia will have a debt of over $200 billion, even somewhere up around $300 billion, although that seems to be fluctuating over the days as we go through the budget.

The budget does not propose a sensible or sustainable way to move out of debt and deficit. Let us step through what that has been. The Treasurer claims that, by mid-2015 or 2016, the budget will return to surplus based on two major things. The first is that in the out years, for six years, Australia’s economic growth will reach 4.5 per cent. Knowing that we have never had more than two years in a row of economic growth of more than four per cent, the government says we are going to have six years of economic growth, even though it could not predict what the budget surplus and deficit would be in three months time and what the unemployment rate possibly would three months time—yet we do know that, for six years out, in three years time it is going to be 4.5 per cent for six years! It is a joke. It is voodoo economics. It is casino economics, as the shadow Treasurer pointed out the other day.

The second issue which Michael Stutchbury went through very well in his article today and which the 7.30 Report host, Kerry O’Brien, raised last night with the Prime Minister is the second aspect of how this government plans to return to budget surplus. It is going to hold down public spending to two per cent, even though historically for the last 20 years it has averaged four per cent. There are no details where those cuts are going to come from. So, for all this hyped-up rhetoric about the government needing to know the details about where the opposition is going to cut the deficit, we hear nothing from the Treasurer or see from his documents about how the government is going to introduce these biggest cuts in 20 years. It is a joke! (Time expired)

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