Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

From the performance we have seen from government senators opposite, I am not sure if they quite have their heart in it, because I have not seen the same degree of passion that I have previously seen. The best they can seemingly do is to compare Australia to the broken nations of Europe and North America. What they do not do is compare Australia to those nations that are our competitors. It is as if you are saying that, if your neighbour had more debt than you, the bank would not foreclose on you. It is as if you are saying that it does not matter if you do not compare yourself with your competitor business; you are comparing yourself with one in some other state and some other part of the world. You do not understand that we are not competing with the nations of Europe. We are not competing with North America. Australia, as a capital-importing country and with our banks being some of the largest wholesale funding borrowers in the world, needs a strong fiscal position. There is in fact a significant trade-off between a government that had no net liabilities and our banks that had some of the largest. They were massive users of wholesale funding markets. No-one is quibbling with the wholesale funding guarantee that was provided when the markets lacked liquidity. What we are quibbling with is that this government is actually putting extra burdens upon those in Australia that do need to import foreign capital to expand the agricultural sector and the mining sector, or to sustain what is left of the manufacturing sector after Labor is finished with it. This even comes down to our home loans and our small businesses, because this government simply does not understand the impact that its behaviour with respect to its unsound fiscal position is having upon Australia's economy.

Despite all the commitments of those opposite, despite the aspirations, despite the bumper stickers and the slogans, unlike in the stock market past performance does provide a predictor of future behaviour. These people opposite have never even come close to delivering a surplus. What they have done is undertake a sustained attack on the Australian private sector economy. The budget when the previous government left office was just over $260 billion. The budget now is over $350 billion and heading north to $370 billion. That sort of massive increase in spending is utterly unsustainable and it shows that the driver of this government's fiscal situation, the driver of these deficits, is in fact the uncontrolled spending of this government.

First of all we had the waste. I sat on the inquiry into the stimulus packages that came in in early 2009. We had a number of witnesses—prominent economists from around Australia, people who supported it, people who opposed it, Treasury, Finance and Prime Minister and Cabinet. When it came to programs like pink batts, this government was warned that, when you throw out a few billion dollars into the economy with no checks and balances and allow entry into a market that is suddenly awash with funds, you are going to get people who do not live up to the sorts of standards that we would expect. You are going to have the taxpayers of Australia ripped off. That is exactly what happened.

The truth is this government do not listen. They were warned. They were warned before it happened. They were warned while it was happening. They tried to hide it after it happened and it was only after a sustained campaign that this government were called to account for the massive waste. They did not even have the guts to say to that minister: 'You are out. You are not welcome here after several billion dollars of taxpayer funds have gone missing. You are out of here after we have had several deaths.' I can only imagine the outrage from the unionists opposite if something like that had happened in a program administered by a coalition government.

We heard from the previous speaker that apparently this government has saved 200,000 jobs. I recall the number being less than 200,000 and more than 200,000. I recall claims that jobs were going to be created. But there is no evidence to prove that at all. It is nothing other than an assertion. An assertion repeated often does not become a fact, despite the best efforts of those opposite. No economic data demonstrates that the stimulus waste saved jobs in this country. The truth is there were many economists who warned the government that a stimulus of that size was not required. After the first stimulus at the end of 2008, the size of the stimulus package the government proposed was an overreaction that went to the wrong people in the wrong way. Again, they did not listen. They did not listen before it happened. They did not listen while it happened and then we had the billions of dollars of waste in the school halls program.