George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Cash—fades into the wallpaper as if it is not an enormous amount of money. To put it in context, when the Howard government was elected in 1996 it inherited from the previous Labor government an accumulated public debt of $96 billion. It had taken the Hawke and Keating governments 13 years to accumulate $96 billion of public debt. It has taken the Rudd government 18 months to commit to expenditure measures that will commit Australia to $188 billion of public debt. But it is worse. Believe it or not, the situation is even more serious than that, because Mr Rudd—displaying all the po-faced sincerity which he displayed that summer’s day in Brisbane on 14 November 2007 when he committed to be an economic conservative, when he committed himself to the proposition that there would be no reckless spending on his watch—is now saying, ‘We have a plan to bring the budget back into surplus.’ But, if we examine that plan, what does it amount to? It amounts to this: from 2013, which will be the fifth consecutive year in which the budget will have been in deficit, the year in which public debt in this country reaches $188 billion—and that is on the budget bottom line alone; it does not include programs like the National Broadband Network and Ruddbank—the Treasury’s projections are that the budget will go back into surplus in the following year if real GDP growth is 4.5 per cent per annum.

As we know, we are in a time of economic recession. We are told that the period of recovery from that recession will be slow. Budget Paper No. 1, ‘Budget Strategy and Outlook’, projects that by the end of next year unemployment will be at least 8½ per cent. What prospect is there anytime soon for economic growth to annualise at 4.5 per cent?