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

The great British wartime leader, Sir Winston Churchill, often said, 'Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' I agree with him. That is why I worked on a book about how Australia came to have a broken budget, a damaged economy and a serious debt mess to fix. It is entitled Labor's Mess. It tells the story of the last six years of Labor chaos; it busts Labor's economic myths; and it contains the facts on spending, deficits and debt, as put by independent third parties. It can be downloaded from my website.

The key things to note are: without policy change, spending will continue to exponentially increase from around $400 billion today to around $700 billion within the decade; without policy change, the budget will be in deficit for the next 10 years, the longest stretch of deficits since World War II; and, without change, the debt will blow out to more than $667 billion over the next decade.

There is a real cost to such budget incompetence. This year alone Labor's debt will cost taxpayers over $12 billion in interest payments, which is about the amount the Commonwealth currently spends on schools. We need to get spending under control—we need to get the debt under control, we need to live within our means and we must all play our part. Tonight the Treasurer will do that by delivering the central plank in our economic action plan, the budget. The question remains: will Labor stand in the way of cleaning up the mess they created? (Time expired)