Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Anybody who was wandering into the public gallery over the past little while would have been forgiven for thinking that they had wandered into the comedy hour—except that this is not a laughing matter; this is a serious issue. It would have been really nice, given that the Labor Party actually raised this issue of debating the Intergenerational report, to have actually looked at the substance contained in this very important report. Why is the Intergenerational report important? The Intergenerational report is important because it is a stocktake. It is a stocktake of where Australia is today and where Australia could be heading in the years to come. We want to engage the Australian people in a conversation about that, in a conversation about the different paths that we can take as a nation. That path discussion, the journey we will take together, will involve different choices depending on where we want to end up.

A responsible government looks to build prosperity for the future. Over my lifetime I have been fortunate to live in a time where average incomes have doubled in real terms since around 1975, and I want that same positive, prosperous future for my baby. When we look at the Intergenerational report it gives us some real facts around life expectancy and demographic changes that we can expect in the years to come. When my baby is born, if it is a boy, he will live on average to 95 years of age and if my baby is a girl she will live on average to 96 years of age. This is a fantastic thing—that people in Australia have some of the greatest life expectancies in the world for both men and women and that our population is living longer and living healthier lives. But it does pose some challenges and we need to be honest about those challenges. Those challenges are that, today, there are only five people of average working age for every person aged 65 and older. For projections going forward, that will drop to 2.7 people of average working age for every person aged 65 and older. Why is that an issue? It is an issue because those people will be asked to share even more of the burden to fund the lifestyle of people in the future, when we cannot currently fund our lifestyle today. That is the most serious aspect of this Intergenerational report.

Net debt to GDP is something that has been examined in the report, and we are on a trajectory of ever-increasing net debt to GDP. It is critical, because currently Australia has about 15 per cent net debt to GDP. This is about four percentage points higher than the nation of Ireland just before the global financial crisis. In six short years, Ireland's net debt to GDP skyrocketed to around 90 per cent. What were the implications of that? Their unemployment doubled. That has a serious impact on people's lives.

This Labor opposition, who actually put us on the path to an ever-increasing spending trajectory that was unfunded and was not able to be managed, except by ever-increasing debt or by increasing taxes, needs to come to a reckoning. That reckoning is the reckoning that is in the Intergenerational report. We can choose to continue along that path and we will see net debt to GDP in 2054 of about 122 per cent. That is double that of Spain today. That is not a record we want to hit.

So we have real choices, and those choices are before us. That is why we want to engage in a public conversation with the Australian population. We want a strong and prosperous future, and I can only hope that those opposite want the same.

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