Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The National Broadband Network—what a cracker that was! Wasn’t the National Broadband Network going to be $4.7 billion? Now it is $43 billion. Oops! That is an Ian Thorpe ‘Oops’. What happened to it? What happened to those tens of billions of dollars? And, by the way, what about the great iconic moment when the now Prime Minister said, with his hand on his heart, in those ads with Brisbane as a backdrop, ‘My fellow Australians, I am a fiscal conservative’? Well, in those days we used to have budget surpluses. In those days, we actually had money in the bank. What happened to those days? The $30 billion deficit—seven years of deficits—to fund one-quarter of negative growth. ‘And, by the way, sometime in the 2020s we will manage to pay off that debt.’

Kevin Rudd will never deliver a surplus budget. Kevin Rudd will never pay off Labor’s debt. Ultimately, the buck stops not with the Prime Minister—in his own words—but with taxpayers. That is what Labor does, writ large. Labor spends and says: ‘It comes out of this tree. It falls from the tree like the leaves in autumn. The money comes down and we will scoop it up and we will dish it out to the poor.’ Well, it does not quite work like that. Money has real value. The money that comes in is taxpayers’ money. It is not Kevin Rudd’s money, and thank God it is not Wayne Swan’s money. It is actually real money. We are saying: if you want to grow the tree into a forest, if you want to grow the economy, you have to invest. When you invest, Australia reaps the rewards. Our policy is costed, it is funded, it is real and it removes discrimination. The louder the Labor Party protests, the more I am convinced this is a damn good policy.

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