Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, it is $8½ billion this year, over $800 million more than they got before the GST was introduced and still they cannot balance the books. It is absolutely appalling, and this is what worries me. It took Mr Costello and the coalition government 10 years to pay off the federal $96 billion debt. How long is it going to take Queensland, with one-fifth the population of Australia, to pay off a debt not much lower than the $96 billion that Mr Keating left with us? How long will it take? It will take a generation or generations to pay it off. That is the problem. The government do not care about intergenerational equity. They do not care if they bankrupt the future of our children and our grandchildren. To repeat and to conclude: name a Labor state government or federal government that has ever paid off the accumulated government debt that they brought into office. Not once has that occurred in the last 109 years of this great Federation. The Bligh government is a disgrace.