Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013. In so doing, I will look at the record of the government on economic management—their record of waste, their record of mismanagement, their record of increased debt and deficits and their economic incompetence. Why is this important and why must we debate this in the Federation Chamber today? Because, at the end of the day, economic vandalism does not just hurt the government; it hurts the people of Australia, the people who will ultimately have to pay the bill.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have very tragically let down the people of Australia. Let us look at the Treasurer's record. First, on the carbon tax, it must be the first 'economic policy', as the Treasurer has labelled it, in history that introduces a cost, reduces output and, somehow, miraculously increases productivity. The Treasurer has a very warped understanding of exactly how productivity works. Today, on the front page of the Financial Review, we see that the carbon tax will create a $4 billion black hole in the budget. This is because the Treasurer refuses to bow down to reality and adjust his assumptions and his models. He is still suggesting that on 1 July 2015, when the Australian and European schemes will be linked, the price per tonne in Australia will be over $25—this at a time when we know that the European prices currently sit around $5 or $6 a tonne. On today's figures, this means, if the schemes are linked in 2015 and we have this dramatic difference in price, that we will see huge revenue shortfalls leaving a massive black hole.

Labor's carbon tax, which has been in place for less than one year, has already seen eight changes. The carbon tax is hurting Australian families because the supposed compensation provided for the introduction of the carbon tax starts making families worse off at $50,000 a year. Only the Labor Party could introduce a carbon tax that actually costs the budget money and hurts Australian families.

What of other promises that the Treasurer has made, like the surplus—or, dare I say, the lack thereof? It was not enough to simply deliver a surplus; the government said it was an 'economic imperative'. They are the ones who set the bar and they are the ones who have failed to reach it. In typical Treasurer fashion, he was quick to blame everybody else for his woes. He has blamed the Tea Party, he has blamed the opposition and, finally, he has ended up blaming the GFC because, he claims, this has received huge revenue right down to the books. But that is not the case when you examine the facts.

The 2007-08 federal budget estimated revenues of $287.3 billion in the year 2010-11, yet the actual revenue ultimately came in at $309.9 billion. So, prior to the GFC, the government predicted less revenue than it actually achieved. If the GFC were as damaging to revenue as the Treasurer would like us to believe, why would the subsequent three budgets increase revenue predictions by so much, in the middle of what he himself called 'the worst economic crisis in 75 years'? We know that this government is currently receiving more than $90 billion in a year in increased revenue over what was received during the last year of the coalition government.

The real issue here is that this government has a spending problem and it has a problem based on its own heroic and very unrealistic assumptions—the assumptions that it has made around, for instance, the mining tax and the amount of revenue that it claimed would be delivered as a result of its introduction. So let us now go to the mining tax.

After having said that the campaign against the carbon tax was just a hysterical fear campaign and after promising a surplus on 366 occasions, the government promised to introduce a mining tax. This mining tax was expected to deliver revenues of upwards of $2 billion a year—and that was after the government wrote down the amount it expected to receive from the mining tax in MYEFO late last year, from upwards of $3 billion. It is important for us to examine the mining tax because the government has linked the tax to spending worth up to $15 billion. But it has been revealed to us only in the last week that the mining tax has failed to deliver the revenue that was forecast. It has failed to deliver the $2 billion. In fact, it has only achieved $126 million, leading to a huge revenue shortfall, raising less than 90 per cent of what was forecast. What is wrong with this picture? Clearly, the government has designed a tax on our miners that is flawed—flawed from its inception. But do not just take my word for it; listen to the words of the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. He has said that the tinkering with the mining tax, the changes made by the current Treasurer and the current Prime Minister, has led to its ultimate design—a design that we have seen will now cost the budget and the Australian taxpayer, who will have to make up the shortfall. If this were not bad enough, let us remind ourselves of where we were only a few short years ago. A few short years ago, during the coalition government, we had a very different situation. We had a government that could manage the books, a government that had done the hard work over 11 years to pay back Labor's $96 billion of debt. Now this government has borrowed more than $200 billion and it took 11 years for the previous government to repay the previous debt; not only on that though, the previous coalition government was in fact able—

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