MOTIONS
Mr HOGAN (Page—Deputy Manager of Opposition Business) (11:03): I stand to second this motion. I certainly hope the government don't guillotine this after I second this. I hope we do have this debate within this chamber.
They will apportion blame to us, of course, as they do for everything. But I think even the Treasurer and the Prime Minister should acknowledge that this is a significant event that has happened in our country today. As the shadow Treasurer just said, we are ticking over into $1 trillion of debt for our nation and all the taxpayers and citizens of Australia.
This is a serious issue, and I certainly encourage the government to have a debate about it. We already know what the Treasure is going to say, unfortunately. He's not the most humble man nor the person with the greatest humility I've ever seen.
Mind you, that speaks for a lot of ministers on the other side. This parliament, this chamber, should have a serious discussion about this today. Yes, the Treasure will get up and say this is all the coalition.
We haven't been in government for nearly five years now, but this will all be our fault. It's everything that we've done and nothing to do with what's going on now. But, as the shadow Treasurer just indicated, the scary thing is that the projections for the next 10 years show, on this government's parameters, it's going to get worse.
There's no plan here from the current government for it to get better. There's a plan that this debt level is just going to continue to grow. As you know, Deputy Speaker Boyce, we have a plan.
We do not want debt to continue to grow like it is. The other thing that the shadow treasurer indicated was—and, again, it's scary—that we export. When you think about a business—and it's the same for an economy—what do you sell?
Where do you make your money? How does Australia make its money? I would hazard a guess that a lot of people on the other side don't even realise where Australia makes its money.
What are the core industries in our country that generate something that no-one else does? Well, other people do, but we get to be able to sell it, especially offshore. That generates us money.
Deputy Speaker, I know you know this. Your own electorate plays a big role in this. The big items that we sell in Australia that generate wealth for Australians—and, again, a lot of city MPs certainly don't understand this—are coal, gas, iron ore, and food and fibre.
They're the four sectors of the economy. All of those come from regional Australia. The member for Parkes is sitting beside me.
He certainly understands that. I know the shadow treasurer understands that. We understand that.
Unfortunately, a lot of people on the other side of the chamber, even though that's how we make all the money, don't like them. Some of them don't like any of the four. A lot of them don't like two of the sectors where we make our money in Australia.
We want to hear the plan. We should be debating this issue today because of the seriousness of it. The other thing that I need to mention is this.
As we tick over these debt levels, the other serious thing that's going on that we should all be aware of and Australian taxpayers should certainly be aware of—and the government should be explaining this as well—is that the cost of this debt is going up every day. What do I mean by that? I know the member for Parkes is aware of this too in another program he's working on.
It's government bond yields in Australia. When the Australian government is having to go to the market, just as a note to the other side, this money doesn't fall from trees, by the way. When you're borrowing money, it doesn't just appear.
When you're spending more than what you earn, as when you're a business or a family, you have to go and borrow it. The Australian government is certainly doing that at levels it's never done before. The rates on that debt are going up.
What does that mean? Again, some of those opposite might not care. What that means is you lose money when the interest rate on your debt increases.
Our debt level is increasing and the interest rate on that is increasing. It means you have less discretionary money to spend on the important things that you need to do. I think we need to have the debate today about this.
The government solution to this, because it's in their DNA, is to say: 'I know. We'll just tax everyone more. We'll just increase taxes on everything.' The problem with that is that history's proven how that works too.
If you increase taxes and continue to increase taxes, that makes you less competitive. As a country, if you become really expensive to do business in or people don't have enough money to spend in their personal budget or in their small-business budgets because you're taxing them more, guess what? They slow down and start to generate less income.
Therefore, there's a really dangerous spiral that you get into of getting a smaller economy, with more debt and more interest on debt. If you start taxing people more, you're going to actually make this worse. But I know what's going to happen in 10 seconds.
The government's going to shut this down. They don't want to talk about this debt level. They don't want to talk about the precarious situation.
We have a plan, and we want to talk about it. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Boyce ): The question is that the motion moved by the member for Goldstein be agreed to.