Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It should have been an issue of no competence. Australia has absolutely no confidence in your competence. That is the issue we are at at the moment. Every time I want to have a bit of a giggle I just go back to projections that you put forward in 2008-09. That was before the North Atlantic global financial crisis. China kept buying our stuff and so did India, so they kept it going on. They predicted that we would have a $21 billion surplus in 2008-09, but we actually ended up with a $27 billion deficit. Then the year after that they predicted a $19.7 billion surplus and we got $57.8 billion—the biggest deficit Australia has ever had in its history. Hooray, we got there, and it only took you a couple of years to do it. Then the year after that there was a $49.4 billion deficit, the second biggest, then a $22.6 billion deficit. They are incredible no matter what they do. They talk about 'return to surplus within the cycle', but the cycle for the Labor Party goes for centuries. It just never stops. The cycle starts getting bad and then it gets worse. Then there is always the promise out there in the sunny plateaus, the sunny outlands, where it will all get better. But now we are left with a resounding success that our finance minister, formerly the minister for climate change—and remember the greatest moral challenge of our time— (Time expired)