Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion to take note of answers because I'm struck by the lack of economic literacy of those who stick to their talking points without any semblance of self-examination as to what their contribution has been to the lack of economic confidence in the broader community. There is no doubt about that. But it is because of the political circus that has been fuelled by an opposition that has always sought to get its own way—a previously rudderless or lacklustre leadership in the Liberal Party and a motley bunch of crossbenchers. And when Senator Gallagher said that she's not going to point the finger, I thought, someone has to point the finger; someone has to say who is responsible for this. They've been warned time and time again that every time they whack more borrowed money into funding additional child care, the cost of child care goes up. Do not now complain that it's unaffordable. Do not come to us and say that the answer to the economic problems in this country is for the government to borrow more money to boost the wages of public servants or the unemployed.

You can get the same result by minimising the size of government, by cutting taxes. But why can't we cut taxes in this country? Because the socialists on the other side of the chamber will not allow it to happen. These self-same socialists are now trumpeting Greece and Spain as somehow the saviours of the economic growth of the world. These were bankrupt economies that had to be bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Do you know why? Because in Greece they had cradle to grave welfare where people would retire at 36 for 40 or 50 years on a fully funded state pension. In Spain the renewable experiment they've foisted upon us bankrupted the country. In Spain such was the extent of the subsidies for renewable energy, solar energy, that they would pay to run diesel generators to put lights on at night to generate supposedly solar power. This is the utopian ideal that we are getting peddled by those who now don't want to point the finger but will celebrate that these countries go from negative growth—where they are absolutely bankrupt—to suddenly having a glimmer of light, because there is some fiscal responsibility applied to them as the great panacea and the great model for the rest of us.

The buck has to stop somewhere. The buck has to stop with some critical self-examination of the policies that have been put forward by the Labor Party, by the Greens party and by some of the more left-wing subsidists in the Liberal Party over the last decade or so.

Senator McAllister made the point that the Liberal Party, and the coalition, is meant to be the party of individual responsibility. Well, so they are. People can make determinations about what to do with their money and they will act in their best interests. What are they deciding now? Their best interest is to actually pay down debt, because they know there are low interest rates. It is a buffer for future problems. It is savings for a rainy day. Any normal-minded person would say, 'If it's good for a household to pay down debt, and if there are demands for states to pay down debt, wouldn't it be advantageous for a federal government or a Commonwealth government to actually pay down debt rather than just continue to rack it up at the tune of $50 billion a year like it started under the Rudd-Gillard governments?'

It was only a decade or so ago we had zero national debt in this country. Now all of a sudden we are on the hook to the tune of $550 billion. The first glimmer of hope is the fact that the Morrison-Frydenberg government is going to deliver a very modest surplus this year and those on the other side want to hijack that and take that away. They are robbing from the future to pay for the excesses of today. It is time to say enough is enough. We've got to get government to live within its means. We have to take our medicine for the failures of this place over the last decade or so, because every time someone says the answer to a bad government program is to pump more money into it, we're stealing from our children and our grandchildren. We are stealing from the future. I've lost track of the number of times everyone has said, 'I can't support this program, because there is not enough money going into it.' Measure the effects of what you have delivered. You've delivered uncertainty to a community. You've delivered debt levels that are unprecedented. You've delivered lower literacy and numeracy rates than we've ever seen. You've delivered the most expensive electricity that we've had in the history of this country. It's all because they will not deal with the reality of circumstances.

Question agreed to.