Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Some of them, but not all! But I thought that Senator Moore might have injected this MPI into the Senate for debate this afternoon as some sort of ironic flourish, perhaps with a smile upon her face. One only has to go back six months, to the parting gift of the former, Labor government to the people of this country, to think Senator Moore's MPI must be ironic. As their parting gift, Labor left us—I just checked before—$123 billion worth of cumulative deficits over the forward estimates, gross debt headed towards $667 billion within a decade and our current net debt at something over $185 billion.

Now the Labor Party have come into the Senate with seemingly straight faces, arguing—let me get this right—that the Abbott government should release the Commission of Audit's report so that we can straightaway determine how pathetic, how hopeless, how unruly, how shambolic the Labor Party were in government! That is clever. I do not quite get the game. Obviously, it is a more sophisticated political game than I am aware of! I find it strange that the government should be forced to quickly tell how dismal, how wasteful and chaotic Labor were at governing. The Labor Party are saying, 'How dare the government keep the voters from knowing the extent of Labor's mismanagement; how dare they'! I do not like giving advice in this place—far be it from me to give advice—but if I were in the opposition I would not want the Commission of Audit's report ever to be released, because all it will say is what a shambles the last government was, what a fiasco that government was and what a failure it was.

The report will come out, no doubt, when the government have fully considered all the detail and when we have had the time to carefully and deliberately examine all the issues raised. I hate to score a political point—because I never do that!—but let me remind the opposition that it took Labor about 130 days to release its taxation review, undertaken by the former Treasury Secretary, Dr Henry. It was 130 days before that was released. I can promise you this: at least when the Commission of Audit report does come out, when it finally comes out, we will not do what the Labor Party did to the Henry report—that is, completely ignore it. We will be listening, we will be learning and we will be acting.

The root problem with the Australian Labor Party at the moment, and I think I have touched on this before along the way, is that the social democratic framework they are working from, that their counterparts in Western Europe are working from, has been exposed as a great con, like a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme, not only sanctioned by the Labor Party but also eulogised by them.

The Labor Party, from the beginning, have assumed that the number of taxpayers as well as national productivity will continue to grow at a sufficient rate to support growing social welfare. The assumption always by the Labor Party and, no doubt, the Greens is that there will be more taxpayers and greater productivity to continue to fund greater and greater expenditure on health, education and welfare. But it breaks down if either of two things happen: (1) if the number of taxpayers or the productive output of a nation is insufficient to meet the obligations made by government; or (2) if the obligations keep increasing because of, for example, increasing life expectancy. What has happened in the West for least the past 20 years is that both scenarios are now appearing. There are not enough taxpayers and we are not sufficiently productive to meet the ever-expanding welfare demands. That, in effect, is the problem. We have neither the taxpayers nor the productivity to continue to fund health, education and welfare. Before anyone says, 'It's all about infrastructure,' it is not. What is killing the West and killing Australia, in fact, is recurrent expenditure. We cannot afford the health, education and welfare expenditure that we are currently committed to. That is the problem.

So how have Western nations met these increasing welfare demands? By going into debt. They have borrowed money to pay for them. Because we do not raise enough money through taxation to pay for health, education and welfare, we have borrowed from our kids and from our grandchildren—so we can live better at their expense. That is what the Labor Party believe. That is what the Greens believe. They think it is okay to borrow from our children and our grandchildren so we can have more welfare, so we can have more superannuation; of course, it is bad luck for them, because they will be paying the bill. That is okay, to the Labor Party and the Greens. It is all right to borrow money from our kids and our grandkids to pay for the high life for us! That is what they say.

The report of the Commission of Audit will say that. It will talk about the economic failures of the Labor Party. Of course it will. They were economically illiterate. But there is something far worse than that about the Left in this country—far worse. It is not just the economic failure; it is the moral failure of the Left in Australian politics and in the Western world. Anyone who believes that it is okay to borrow from our children and our grandchildren to pay for recurrent expenditure is absolutely disgraceful. That is the problem with the Left in the Western world. Why do you think the United States, Great Britain and Western Europe are falling? Why is their power, relatively, starting to fade? I will tell you why. It is because they have lived beyond their means. That is the truth.

Australia, just six or seven years ago, did not have any debt, but now we are stuck with it. What is worse is that it is becoming structural, which of course the Labor Party and the Greens do not mind. They do not mind if there is constant debt, because governments then become the centre of the economy. When all the spivs, the speculators and the rent seekers come along, they can decide who gets the money. That is what the Left in this country believe. They stand up here, as they will in a minute, and say, 'We should not cut X, Y or Z.' That is what they will argue. They never come in here and say, 'We should cut A, B and C.' They never come in here and tell us how they are going to solve the problem—a problem that they created. They created this huge structural debt, the fastest growing debt in the Western world. They created it. Have they ever come in here and said, 'We could solve it by doing A, B and C'? Never. All they do is run a scare campaign saying that the ABC is going to be cut or that the Public Service is going to be cut.

The fact is that someone in this country is going to have to make some tough decisions—not, frankly, for my welfare, the welfare of the government or the welfare of the Labor Party or the Greens but for the welfare of our children and our grandchildren. Either we start to live within our means—either we cut expenditure or raise taxation, one or both of those things—or our children and our grandchildren will be paying our debt. If you do not believe me, go and speak to a teenager in Greece. Quite frankly, if I were a teenager in Greece, I would want to shoot every baby boomer and every politician in the damn country. We should not ever let that happen in this country. Under our watch, it will not.