Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me make a prediction so blindingly obvious that it barely qualifies as one: higher taxes are coming. We all know this. You don't spend months and months floating conversations about revenue fairness and structural pressures unless you're preparing the patient for the needle. Governments don't soften the ground unless they are about to dig. The problem is this: arithmetic, that most offensive of political realities for this government. For the better part of two decades, government spending per person has grown at roughly twice the pace of tax collected per person. That gap is not going to close itself. It widens. That's what it does. When it widens fast enough, what does it do? It just swallows you up.

We are spending like a country with a mining boom and taxing like a country in denial. The result? A population that is increasingly dependent on government cheques, subsidies and services while at the same time less able to stand on its own two feet. What happens? Independence shrinks as the state expands, and productivity takes a nosedive.

Approximately two decades ago we had no net debt. Today every man, woman and child effectively carries a public debt of tens of thousands of dollars. Our Commonwealth's network has evaporated, and who inherits the tab? It's not the pollies cutting the ribbons today; it's the young, the ones who are told endlessly that they are the future while we quietly mortgage that future. When government spends money, someone else eventually pays.