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

There certainly has been a very large level of hypocrisy, deceit, perfidy and fraud perpetrated in this chamber and elsewhere about the budget in the last 24 hours, but it has all come from the opposition benches, not from the government. As Senator Cormann pointed out, this budget is tough and fair and it is designed to make us more prosperous and more resilient. It is designed to get the economy back on track. Yet from the opposition all we get is half-truths and outright deceit in terms of what the measures in this budget actually achieve.

I was bemused, I suppose, this morning listening to poor old Mr Bill Shorten trying to develop a mythical family on $100,000 a year, with two children aged 12 and five. He tried to say that this family would be worse off. My first reaction was: why did they wait seven years for the second kid? Nevertheless, Mr Shorten no doubt will have manufactured this family. He does not mention that, if the opposition were to support our carbon tax legislation, this family would be $550 a year better off than they currently are. No, the opposition does not want to let a fact get in the way of their discussion. We had Senator McLucas making the outrageous claim that we have cut $377 million out of preventative health. We have not cut $377 million out of preventative health. We have moved one of the useless bureaucratic agencies that the previous government established back to where it belongs: the Department of Health, which had previously done excellent work in the area of preventative health and will continue to do so.

In the area of Indigenous affairs, as Senator Scullion has pointed out, there has been a 4½ per cent cut across the board, but if anyone here wants to suggest that there was no waste within the way the Labor government went about attempting to deliver services to the Indigenous community in Australia, that is a complete joke. As Senator Scullion pointed out, they built the childcare centres but did not worry about where the childcare workers were going to come from. It is completely typical of the way this government carried on.

I looked at some of the comments in today's papers. One of the key focuses was how to address the huge explosion of spending that was due to hit the budget in 2017. As Senator Mason pointed out, who could have imagined what a Labor government could do to a surplus of $40 million in the bank, but, goodness, we sure know now what a Labor government can do. It seems to be in their DNA to overspend and have no idea about how to implement. We are even getting evidence of that from various court cases going on at the moment, some with tragic results.

Why was there going to be a huge explosion in 2017? It was former Treasurer Swan's pathetic attempt, time after time, to argue that one day he would produce a budget surplus. In his last budget, when it appeared that the Labor government knew the writing was on the wall—that they were going to lose government—they came up with apparently wonderful policy after apparently wonderful policy which they did not fund past the forward estimates. They were unfunded promises. Now they want to carry on about cuts to things that never existed as well as cuts that we have been forced to make due to their attitudes, their spending, their waste, their inability to implement and their inability to evaluate what they do and how they do it.

The Canberra Times today says:

… the measures are well crafted, the numbers internally consistent and coherent. This budget invests in future sustainability …

But it mentions that there will be short-term pain. We do not apologise for that. It is not our fault that there is short-term pain. It is the opposition— (Time expired)