Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, you will have to use the screen on your own laptop or iPad to see the truth of what I'm telling you. Any Australian who cares to hear the truth, that this government wants to deny, that they are a failure as economic managers, just Google 'Australian government debt' and you will get the facts on Wikipedia. These are the facts. In 2010 there was $147 billion of gross debt. They worked pretty hard on that with their great mantra of 'jobs and growth' and by 2011 they grew the debt to $191 billion. By 2012, they grew Australia's national debt to $233 billion. Not happy with that, in 2013 they bumped it up a little further, to $257 billion. Well, by this time there was a pattern emerging. Under the Liberal-National parties, who claim to be great economic managers, who came in to fix the debt crisis, debt went up and up and up—and it continues. In 2013, even though they don't want to accept it, they must have seen there was a bit of a pattern here. I remember that they came in here and did a bit of a deal with the Greens to get rid of the debt ceiling, which was then sitting at $300 billion, because they knew they were going to fly past that. Indeed, that is exactly what they did. By 2014, this government, these so-called good economic managers, had Australia's gross debt at $319 billion. In 2015, it was $368 billion. In 2016, it was $420 billion. In 2017, it was $500 billion. In 2018—it keeps going up—it was $531 billion, and in 2019, according to this source, as of last week it was $541 billion. That is the truth about this government and their capacity to manage the economy. They have celebrated a surplus that doesn't exist. They sold congratulatory mugs on their website. They've lifted debt year after year for seven years in a row. This is economic mismanagement that has resulted in the stagnation of our economy and placed an incredible burden on families. And to do that with a sort of little double-deal, a little shuffle of the pea and thimble trick that they tried in April last year in the budget, when they declared that they were back in black—to even do that in that deceptive way, what they did was bank $4.6 billion from the NDIS. That was money that was there and should have gone out to people with disability. This government pulled that money out, yanked it out, and shoved it over onto what they declared as a surplus—a non-existent surplus—all the while racking up debt year after year. This government can find money and raise money for themselves in the bushfire crisis with a donation button, but they still cannot manage to raise the funds to get the budget back in black. This mob are no AC/DC. They're a show, and they've got the greatest showman on Earth at the front with all the sales lines and all the magic marketing phrases of Mr Morrison. The reality is that this is a government that is incapable of managing the economy of Australia. Australians are paying the price of a government that has no plan for jobs, no plan for wage growth and no plan to address climate change that Australians know, as of last summer, is reality. It's Mr Morrison and his government full of slogans, but they have no plan for our economy.