Speeches

Budget Reply Speech

Wednesday 26th May 2010

This is a budget that betrays the truth by a government that have betrayed the trust of the Australian people. The government have lost their mandate not just for their failures, which are many and costly, but more significantly for their betrayal. Many governments from time to time have failed. But betrayal is the reserve of the Rudd government. The electorate sometimes forgives failures, especially for a first-term government, but the electorate is right to punish betrayal. The Rudd government have betrayed those for whom they willingly, knowingly and falsely raised hopes and expectations before the last election. They will now be held to account for those expectations at the election. They will be held to account for the things they led people to believe, for the things that they allowed people to believe and for the things they talked up so that people believed. It will be for what the government have failed to do in their own actions and the way that they have done it, whether it be the home insulation bungles, the budget blow-outs, the failure on border protection or the Building the Education Revolution debacles.

All of these things they will be judged for, but the one I think they will be judged most harshly for is the way they led Australians to believe it would be a very different story under a Rudd government. To that question they cannot give an answer. They may try and seek to point to clever statements on carefully prepared notes that were circulated before the last election, but what the electorate will hold the government to account for is what they were led to believe.

This is a budget that relies on false assumptions. It is a budget that spends the future today, creating a burden of debt once again for our future: $93.7 billion in net debt, a $6.5 billion annual interest payment created by an addiction to spending, and deficits of $40.8 billion in this budget that has been announced and $57.1 billion for the year that is about to conclude. This government’s reckless spending requires borrowings of a staggering $700 million a week. This is an extraordinary figure. As each second ticks by, as each day passes, the debt bill continues to rise—and it is a debt bill that is necessary only to satisfy this government’s addiction to spending. Remember it was the Prime Minister, when in opposition, who declared to the Australian people that this reckless spending must stop, raising those expectations, making a suggestion that somehow he was going to maintain the consistency of economic management that was offered by the Howard-Costello team. But what we have seen is spend after spend, deficit after deficit, and a debt that continues to spiral.

By contrast, the coalition in responding to this budget has outlined real measures for savings—real measures that are designed to get a budget back on track, measures that do not rely on the high-tax-and-spend model of Labor governments both today and in the past, but most specifically today because this government has really taken the perception of Labor’s administration in terms of fiscal matters to a completely new level, leaving in its wake the Whitlam government, leaving in its wake the governments that have borne the Labor name in the past. This is a government that has relied on a great big tax to fund its addiction to spending—and not just any great big tax but a tax that has aimed a dagger at the heart of Australia’s prosperity in our mining sector. This government can spin until it loses sense of balance on these matters, but at the end of the day it is just implausible to suggest that a great big tax on the mining sector, which puts our sector at a disadvantage to all of our competitors around the world, can in any way assist. The government might want to argue the toss in terms of various economists’ reports about the impacts of these matters, but they cannot sustain an argument that this type of tax will assist.

We will not introduce a tax. In fact, as the Leader of the Opposition has said, we will repeal it in government if it is passed by this parliament. We have said quite clearly that we do not support this tax. Therefore, as a responsible consequence we do not support the measures that would be potentially supported by such a tax. These are difficult decisions, but difficult decisions are what coalition governments are good at. It is what we have a record for. It is what we have the trust of the Australian people for. They understand these things. They understand our record. They understand our ability to exercise this discipline in government and deliver the economic management the country deserves. Before the last election the then shadow Treasurer and the then Leader of the Opposition, when they were in their ‘reckless spending must stop’ mode, suggested grand total savings of just $3 billion in their post-budget reply. This was also a budget reply that said there would be 2,600 trade training centres, that they would be building childcare centres all around the country, that every small business who had a bill overdue would be able to get interest paid on these things. These were extraordinary speeches; the record has proven their worth. In the post-budget reply speech there were just $3 billion worth of savings. Contrast that to the $46.7 billion that has been announced by the coalition.

The government argue, ‘Some of that is capital and some of that is not about tax cuts and things of that matter,’ and they want to argue the technical distinctions. But when it comes to reducing debt, not borrowing money for an NBN counts. It means that you do not have as much debt. When you plan to sell off Medibank Private to reduce debt, it will reduce debt. The debt burden will remain long after. Hopefully this country will once again return to surplus, but that is incredibly unlikely under this government.

This is a government that will never deliver a surplus because this is a government of blow-outs. The blow-outs are well on the record. They are relying on returning to surplus with the princely sum of $1 billion. You could fairly say that $1 billion in the context of any other government is a significant amount of buffer, but with this government it is what Monty Python would describe as ‘wafer thin’. One billion dollars for this government is what they can blow out in one cabinet meeting, with one decision to try and fix the problems that they themselves...

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