Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to comment about the so-called stimulus package also; as a member of the Senate Standing Committee on Economics I think it is important that I do. I also put on the record that I have never supported any of the stimulus packages, even the first one. It is clearly on the Hansard that I noted that position.

I did not support them because they are a ridiculous and profligate waste of money that have increased our debt load and will have to be repaid. I did not support them because Australia still had the capacity at that point in time, with three per cent interest rates, to further reduce interest rates. It was a position which was not the same as that of other nations in the world, who had around a zero per cent interest rate, so they only had the fiscal lever left—they did not have the monetary lever.

I do this also as the only accountant in this place, so I am very much attuned to this—as opposed to the so-called blackboard economics that Senator Cameron was talking about. I actually lived, breathed and made my money by dealing with this sort of problem. Our nation now has, by reason of a fiscal stimulus package, a massive debt that has to be repaid. If you believe the proposition that the fiscal stimulus stimulated the economy, then of course you have to believe the proposition that paying it back and taking that money out is obviously going to have a huge negative effect on the economy. But you are going to pay back more than the fiscal stimulus: you are going to pay back the interest on it as well.

Let’s look at what we could have done as an alternative. If we had stayed out of the economy at that point in time and, instead of going in and inspiring the dollar to appreciate, had taken the interest rates down and tried to devalue the dollar, then a lower dollar itself would have acted as a stimulant instrument in the economy and started driving the economy forward. But oh, no—they would not do that. Why did Labor not do that? Because the IMF told them that it was not the right way to go.

Of course, the IMF was talking to a whole range of nations that were in a different position to ours. Ours is predominantly an export-type nation. So this government has gone in and has borrowed up to the hilt. It has stacked us up with debt to the eyeballs so that we could go out on some spending spree and have the stimulus of the nation spread across the carpet on Christmas Day with ‘made in China’ written on the back. That is what the Labor Party has delivered to us as an outcome. Then they have the gall and the hide to say that their stimulus package is what kept us out of recession.