Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

The proposition before the House this afternoon is that apparently there is an unfair budget which is damaging Australia's economy. That is the proposition which has been put. Let us remember that what damaged the economy of Australia was six years of chaotic and incompetent management. Who can forget the rank incompetence of a Treasurer who stood up in May 2012 and said: 'The four years of surpluses I announce tonight are a powerful endorsement of the strength of our economy'? What about the ignominious failure to deliver? What was that a powerful indicator of? What that was a powerful indicator of was that panicky and inexperienced hands were at the economic wheel. This was a man who promised a surplus for 2012-13; he actually delivered an $18 billion deficit following deficits in the previous four years of $27 billion, $54 billion, $47 billion and $43 billion—and yet he expected the Australian people to believe that he would deliver a dramatic turnaround in one year. An indicator of rank incompetence and rank inexperience. What he did do was leave this country on a trajectory heading towards a massive government debt, had corrective action not been taken, of $667 billion by 2024 according to his own documents.

Who can forget some of the high points of the damage to Australia's economy that was done by the chaotic incompetence of the previous government? Who can forget the blow-out of $11 billion in border protection costs? Who can forget the blow-out of some $6 billion to $8 billion in the cost of school halls? Who can forget the pink batts program, which cost $2.8 billion and four lives, or the $900 stimulus cheques sent to 27,000 Australians overseas and 21,000 dead people? We ask who can forget? I will tell you who can forget that: it is the people on the other side of the chamber who are forgetting that. They have wilfully blinded their minds and they have closed their ears to the historical record. But the accuracy of the historical record is there. The Labor Party has the temerity to talk about an unfair budget; what could be more unfair than the generational inequity of loading a huge debt burden on successive generations because you are too weak and too incompetent to make the necessary decisions?

By contrast, what is boosting the economy is a well-structured budget that is part of an integrated economic strategy to back the private sector and to build prosperity. Let's look at some of the indicators: the ABS data released on 6 November this year is that jobs growth is 12,300 per month this year. That is more than double the 2013 average. In the ANZ's consumer confidence survey released on the 25th, consumer confidence is at 114.3—above the long-run average since 1990. The NAB's monthly business survey for October showed that confidence was up by 12 points, which is the biggest monthly gain since 1998. Those are the facts about how the economy is performing. It is doing that because what this government is doing is establishing the conditions for the private sector to prosper.

If there is one thing that the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government never understood, it was that the prosperity that generates the tax revenue—on which all of the incidences of a civilised society depend, such as health, education and aged-care—depends on the private sector. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government seemed to think that you could solve everything by pumping taxpayers' money into government owned ventures: $43 billion was pumped into the National Broadband Network company and $10 billion went into the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

What were we left with? A series of deficits and a huge debt, which we are now steadily and credibly working to turn around. We have a steady and credible plan to reduce the budget deficit over four years. We are steadily doing what we said we would do. We have removed the carbon tax and the mining tax, as we said we would. We are putting in place the stimulus to get the private sector working and we are capturing business opportunities through the enormously important free-trade agreements in Korea, Japan and China. We are doing what we said we would do to stimulate the private sector. That is the way to generate prosperity, boost the economy and create more jobs. What could be fairer than that?

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