Chris Ketter (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The latest budget confirms that the economic credentials of the coalition government are in tatters. When it comes to the issues of expenditure and taxation, the mythology would have it that the coalition will always be more responsible in those areas. But, when one examines the facts of the matter, it is quite the opposite. I was interested in the response to the budget from Alan Kohler today in TheAustralian. He pointed out, quite rightly, that the 2014 budget was when the then Treasurer, Mr Hockey, said:

The days of borrow and spend must come to an end.

… …   …

... the time to fix the Budget is now.

What happened was that, under the coalition government, spending went from 24 per cent of GDP in Labor's last year of office to 25.6 per cent in 2015-16. Taxes went up as well.

During the course of question time I asked Minister Cormann a question in relation to the gross debt. We will see in coming months the gross debt exceeding half a trillion dollars. As I said in my question, that is a total of $20,000 for each Australian man, woman and child. What hypocrisy on the other side. When we look at the record of the then opposition back in 2009, Mr Turnbull described the $200 billion of gross debt at that time as colossal, unprecedented, a mountain and a summit, but we have the fact that we are on track to have a projected gross debt of $725 billion. So let us put to bed the myth that the coalition has any credibility when it comes to the level of tax and the level of expenditure. I always go back to the research done last year by respected economist Mr Stephen Koukoulas on the issue of taxation. I have shared this in the past, but I think this puts the final nail in the coffin of the reputation of the coalition when it comes to these points.

I note that Minister Cormann's responses to my questions were quite trite: that the coalition would always have lower taxes and less expenditure than Labor. That is the cheap line that keeps coming back, but, if you look at the actual record before us, you see that, in the 10 years in which the tax to GDP ratio was at its highest, eight of the 10 years were under a Liberal administration. Labor came in at about eight and nine in the order of those 10 years. Even more extraordinarily, as Mr Koukoulas points out in his article of April last year, of the 10 years with the lowest level of taxation as a proportion of GDP, Labor was in office in all 10 years. So let us not have this cheap rhetoric that the coalition will always have lower taxes and will spend less, because the record is absolutely the opposite.

But let us get to the budget. I would say it is something of a cruel hoax when it comes to the issue of infrastructure. Yes, there are some headlines about the amount of money that is supposedly available for infrastructure, but it is a fantasy. When we look at the new announcements of funding, the only real money that has been announced in the budget is for a local road in the seat of Gilmore which is called the Far North Collector Road. There is $13 million for that initiative. When it comes to my home state of Queensland, as our Premier said today, Queensland has had a slap in the face when it comes to infrastructure investment. We know that the federal government has had the business case for around 12 months for the Cross River Rail project. This is, according to Infrastructure Australia, the No. 1 infrastructure project that needs to be funded in the state of Queensland. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.