David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am getting to that. Look at the days of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister and the debt that was accumulated in a very short period there. It was legendary how quickly he turned things around. Things went ‘straight down the toilet’, so to speak. Yet in 18 months this government have surpassed Gough Whitlam’s record. They are spending 29 per cent of GDP. Debt as a percentage of GDP is at record levels, and it is already much higher than Gough Whitlam’s debt. I take you back once again to before the election. Peter Garrett said before the last election, ‘Just wait until we get elected and then we will change it all.’ I tell you what, in the last 18 months you have changed everything. I saw Senator Conroy standing there saying, ‘We’ll deliver every single one of our election promises,’ yet last night you broke most of them. You have broken them over and over again. From the promise to deliver surpluses through to the promise to deliver broadband by the end of last year—whatever it is, it is all broken.

Let me address one issue on debt. The debt that we are accumulating as a nation, which every Australian man, woman and child will have to repay and pay interest on, is not just a consequence of the global financial crisis. This is demonstrated by the fact that this government have spent $124 billion on new discretionary spending that did not have to be spent. They have made a decision to put on the books an extra $124 billion that did not have to be there. When you are looking at a total net debt of $188 billion, as projected in the current figures, that is roughly two-thirds of the debt that we are expecting to have to pay back for every Australian man, woman and child. Two-thirds of that debt has been accumulated on the national accounts by discretionary spending. So we have $124 billion of new spending—and that is only so far—but very little in the way of tough decisions.

In the lead-up to this budget we heard all sorts of stories about the tough decisions. We have heard the ministers today saying that they are making tough decisions. But where are the tough decisions in this budget? Going out and borrowing more money is not a tough decision; it is the wimp’s way out of this. A tough decision would be to take tough decisions seriously and say: ‘We do have money coming back. Maybe we shouldn’t add all this extra spending that we are doing. Maybe we should look at some of the programs we have instituted that perhaps are not as good as we think they are. Maybe we should not have spent as much on the way through this in the last 12 months on profligate stimulus packages in areas that are not going to provide any lasting economic benefit.’

What will this debt mean for Australians? Does it really matter if the government goes into debt? Senator Conroy said that Standard and Poor’s are saying that we can actually handle the level of debt Australia have gone into, that it is not the end of the world. Maybe as a nation, at this stage, we can meet the interest payments—there is no threat to our ability to repay—but what does it actually mean for Australians? It means $9,000 worth of debt for every Australian man, woman and child.