Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also take note of answers by Senator Wong to questions asked by Senators Abetz, Cormann and Sinodinos. The Labor government currently have two choices. They are going to have to increase taxes or they are going to have to fold at the next election. From the way they are currently conducting their business, it seems pretty clear that they are promising to spend up big while they think they still have the opportunity to make promises, but they have no way whatsoever of knowing how those promises are going to be funded when—if—they ever return to government.

It is pretty clear that there is a real move within this Labor government to increase taxes. Of course, that is the sort of thing you expect from a Labor government: get yourself into extreme debt and then try to wiggle your way out of it by increasing taxes. The major newspaper in my own state, the Courier-Mail, quotes Senator Doug Cameron as saying:

'When you see what is happening in Queensland and New South Wales … of course we can't criticise these other governments if we are doing the same thing ourselves. If the tax base doesn't increase, my concern is we will end up losing jobs and import-ant programs.

That is going to be the outcome. They are going to have to cut jobs, increase taxes or simply fold up their tent and let the party that is the party of good economic management clean up their mess yet again.

It has been interesting to watch Treasurer Swan and Prime Minister Gillard attempt to somehow suggest that the issues in Queensland and New South Wales have been curtain-raisers for the way an Abbott government would behave. An Abbott government will not behave like that, but the one thing an Abbott government will have in common with the Queensland and New South Wales governments is the fact that we are left to clean up the mess created in budgetary terms by a Labor government—typical yet again. They can spend and spend and never feel that they have to be accountable for that, because they go off on their little ideological trips and forget about what needs to happen.

It is extraordinary when we look at the extent of the unfunded proposals put up by this government. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is something very dear to my heart, but it is something that will break the hearts of thousands and thousands of people with disabilities and their families if it does not come to fruition. But there is nothing that this government has done to suggest that it will have the money needed in the next budget and the other budgets up until 2015 to progress the National Disability Insurance Scheme unless it increases taxes and cut jobs. There is nothing to show that they will have the funds to undertake their airy-fairy election-winning—hopefully, I think, for them—promises with regard to the Gonski education reforms.

Then of course we have the cruellest joke of all, which is the unfunded dental scheme which would be extended from children between 12 and 18 to children between two and 18. This would completely replace what has been a very successful chronic disease dental scheme that was developed under the then health minister, Tony Abbott. What Labor forgets to mention is that for the 19 months between when they closed down the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme and start their own scheme, there will be no funding of any sort from the Commonwealth government for dental. I continue to be bemused by the fact that the Greens could have gone along with this unfunded scheme that is on the never-never like so many of the other bubbles of pretend policy that come out of this government.

Question agreed to.