Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In fairness to the , who struggled through this rationale for record gross and net debt under the Abbott and Turnbull governments, the problem with this government is not that the assistant minister is the worst of them; the problem with the government is that the assistant minister is no worse than the Treasurer or the Minister for Finance when it comes to trying to rationalise this record debt.

One of the things that I would like to respond to that the assistant minister talked about is the difference in the bottom line between the government and the opposition at the last election. It is very troubling that somebody who is a Treasury assistant minister has not realised that the difference he describes between the bottom lines of the two major parties at that election has been abandoned by his own government. The measures that created the difference—the so-called zombie measures—no longer exist. I would hope, in the interests of the country, that somebody who is a Treasury assistant minister in a federal government would understand that some weeks ago, in the budget that we are talking about right now and that he has been sent in to defend, that difference was abandoned when they abandoned the so-called zombie measures. The reality is that we said at the election that those measures would not go ahead and that the government's bottom line was not an accurate reflection of the difference between the two parties, and we were actually proven right on budget night. It is troubling and disappointing. It is not even funny; it is really just quite a shame that that has not yet dawned on an assistant minister in the Treasury portfolio and nobody has yet explained to him that that difference has been abandoned by those opposite.

Predictably, as I anticipated before, those opposite, after four years of government, would like to pretend that gross debt, which in the life of this parliament will double from what they inherited, is somebody else's fault. They do that right across, whether it is power prices or a number of things where those opposite think that everything bad that happens in this country is Labor's fault. So I want to put on the record these numbers, which show that the pace of the accumulation of debt has been faster under those opposite than it was under the former Labor government—remembering, of course, that the former Labor government had to deal with the sharpest synchronised downturn in the global economy since the Great Depression, with everything that that means for the budget, whereas those opposite have relatively rosy global conditions. They have no excuses to point to for this substantial deterioration in budget. These are the numbers that should be on the record.

Those opposite, the coalition, are accruing gross debt $1.65 billion a month more quickly than the former government. They are accruing net debt $511 million a month more quickly than their predecessors, the Labor government—that is $380 million a week and $55.3 million a day quicker for gross debt, and $118.2 million a week or $16.9 million a day faster for net debt. Before they try and pretend that those numbers have been pulled out of the air, they can do the calculations if they like, or, in the assistant minister's case, he should probably get somebody else to do them for him. Gross debt grew under Rudd and Gillard by $226 billion in 69 months; under Abbott and Turnbull it has grown by $219 billion in less than two-thirds of the time, which is 44½ months.

These are not numbers that the Labor Party has made up. These are not numbers that we have pulled out of the air. These are basic calculations from the government's own budget papers and from the budget updates which are provided to the Australian people on a regular basis. If you use that measure, if you use those budget updates, which are generally put out on a Friday afternoon, for good reason—in the hope that all the journos have gone home—you will see that, when it comes to net debt, there was $175 billion on the day they came to office; it is now $317 billion. Gross debt was $280 billion, and it will be $500 billion tomorrow. That does give you a sense not just of the state of the books, which the assistant minister has described as 'a truckload of debt', which is a pretty apt description—

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