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

That is! How did Niall Ferguson miss that one? There was $197,302 for 'sending and responding to messages about climate change: the role of emotion and morality', and $314,000 for a study to determine if birds are shrinking. Just ring up Inghams! Find out about their chickens. They are getting bigger and bigger. In fact, I remember the late Bing Lee saying to me that the birds at Inghams are getting too large for his freezers when he was selling the freezers at Christmas; the turkeys were too large. And they are spending $314,000 on identifying it. Hang on—there was $145,000 for a study of sleeping snails, to determine 'factors that aid life extension'! There was $210,000 to study the early history of the moon. You can imagine Tim staring out longingly from the window at the Lodge at the moon and thinking, 'You know what, Julie? We should have a good look at that. Why don't we spend $210,000 to work out what happened before Neil Armstrong got there?'—as if no-one has ever thought about it for years.

If it were not taxpayers' money it would be laughable. If they were not the hard-earned dollars of so many good, diligent, committed Australians, it would be laughable. But, unfortunately, the Treasurer keeps saying: 'We're doing well; we're living within our means. Let's compare ourselves to some other countries.' Australia's general government expenditure in 2012 was 36.3 per cent of GDP. Let us compare. Switzerland was less: 34.7 per cent of GDP. New Zealand was less: 33% of GDP. Hong Kong, 21.1%; Korea, 21.6%; Singapore, just 17.4%.

The Treasurer is always keen to compare us to the worst. He is always keen to compare us to the nations that are in deep trouble, as if being ahead of those nations is somehow a great achievement, as if being ahead of those nations somehow lays down the foundations for future growth. But our competition is coming from our region and the Labor Party just does not get it. They mouth the words about it being the Asian century, but they do not understand that the competition for our children, and our grandchildren and beyond, is going to be in our region, in our sphere of influence. They are the people who are highly competitive.

We must benchmark our nation against the best, and not the worst. That is what we must do. We must aspire to run faster than anyone else, to do better than anyone else, to put in greater effort and to be more productive and more innovative than anyone else. That is the great legacy we can leave our children, not money being spent on reviews into snails, birds drinking or the history of the moon. We need to spend money on our people—our greatest investment—to give them the opportunity to hope for a better life without the dead hand of a Labor government being laid upon their back at every moment. The great legacy of this Labor Party, apart from incompetent and, dare I say it, corrupt government, is the debt it is leaving Australians. That is the pain it is leaving the next generation of Australians.

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