Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Dental Benefits Amendment Bill 2012 and the disallowance motion moved by the shadow minister for health. It will not surprise people to learn that I will be taking a different approach to the one the member for Melbourne took in his remarks in this respect. In fairness to the member for Melbourne, what he said was true to his heart and true to his ideological view of the world. Paraphrasing, he said that the Greens and their coalition partner, the government, are happy to announce a dental scheme without allocating the funding for it and without thinking through the consequences and how much this will cost. That is a position that the Greens take very regularly. They do not have a particular view about economic responsibility. They believe that government should be there at every step of people's lives and to hell with the consequences. The Greens are not renowned for fiscal responsibility.

However, it is shameful for the Labor Party—who claim that they are trying to build a surplus, and this current government has never delivered one—to have stood alongside the Greens when this was announced. The health minister, representing the Labor Party, announced this policy without announcing how it would be funded. It is one of the policies which add to the $120 billion black hole of commitments that the government has made in the last few months, as reported by the Australian Financial Review. These are commitments that the government is announcing without thinking through the consequences and without allocating the appropriate appropriation from the budget to pay for these big new policies into the future. We know that adding dental care to Medicare would be hugely expensive. In fact, it was a former Labor finance minister, Peter Walsh, who commented some time ago that the quickest way to bankrupt the Commonwealth would be to add dental care to Medicare.

This is an issue that needs to be thought through carefully, and that is the approach the coalition has announced it will take. In January this year the Leader of the Opposition made a very good speech in respect of managing Australia's economy and managing Australia's budget in an appropriate manner. In that speech he said that we have an aspiration to ensure that the dental needs of Australians are looked after better than they are now but that we need to do it in a well-thought-through and budgeted way so that we are not just adding additional cost to the Australian budget without thinking about the impact on Australian taxpayers, because ultimately it is taxpayers' money that we are about here.

Much is said about the benefits to children who will be covered by the scheme from 2014, which we heard the member for Melbourne talking about. But little is ever thought about the consequences for those same children when they get older and have to deal with increasing debt and deficits because of commitments made by previous generations, and that should always be one of the considerations that we give in this place. All the needs of society need to be tempered by the fact that there is a limited resource in the federal budget. Already we have a government that is spending more than it earns each year and that is why we have a record debt. The government will boast that it is a low debt compared with the rest of the world, but of course you do not compare your mortgage to that of your next door neighbour; you look at the way you can address your mortgage yourself within your means. What we are seeing now increasingly is that the Australian budget is becoming more and more difficult to manage because the government continues to make inappropriate and badly-thought-through decisions in relation to expenditure. We have seen that on a range of policy issues. Most famously is the pink batts scheme—

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