Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was actually a nightmare—I take the point.

What we have in front of us today is quite stark really. We have a party of there that wants to be in executive government once again. God forbid that from ever happening. They already have a black hole of $51 billion over the forward estimates. If you add to that them playing around with the old NBN and trying to scare people all over Australia—the cost to bring out fibre to the premise would been another $75-85 billion—what we are talking about here is the potential to add another $1 billion of interest a year to the bill that we have to pay. These people opposite know no bounds when it comes to making promises—false promises—about what they would deliver as a government.

I want to remind those listening today: do not forget for one millisecond the financial ruin that the Australian Labor Party, at the behest of the Australian union movement, left this country in. That is the fact. They took a very solid foundation of financial management from the Howard-Costello years, where the last surplus was over $20 billion—money in the bank—and what did they do? They trashed it. They absolutely trashed it. They could not control their spending. They still cannot. They are the same tired frontbench from the previous government days. Until such time as the personnel opposite are taken from the seats that they have found so comfortable and are replaced with some people with a degree of intelligence and commonsense, they have no story to tell.

See this speech in context