Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) (17:47): I was actually enjoying Senator Feeney's speech. It was quite well written. It had good wordcraft in it. It had proper pitch. All around, it was almost Shakespearean. It is a shame he is leaving the chamber because I was hoping he would go for longer. The trouble is it was a load of rubbish. That is the problem—it was a complete load of rubbish. It was going so well that I was waiting for the punchline and then it came to the part where they are decarbonising the planet. That is the part that always throws you. Once they talk about decarbonising the planet, you know, 'They're back; it's the Labor Party.' This is the height of lunacy. There is one group in Australia who will benefit from the carbon tax—they will absolutely reap the rewards from the carbon tax—and that group is the coalition. We are going to use it as a mechanism to kick those opposite out. It is so obvious—it is as obvious as the nose on your face. The Australian people hate it and those opposite know they hate it. I do not know why they pursue it. They should have some gumption and stand up about it. Even if they believe in a lot of the tripe, they should have the gumption to stand up in their party room and say: 'This tax is going to destroy our party. If we go forward with it, it is going to destroy us. Unfortunately, policy is never bigger than a party and the policy has to go.' But they have not done that. They are carting themselves to oblivion. Let us deal with the budget issues. The NBN is going out of the back door. It is absurd. The NBN is now just racking up major cost overruns. It does not have the customer base it was supposed to have. In accountancy there is a thing called impairment that you have to place on assets when you realise they are not making money, that what you paid is not what you would get if you had to sell it. Believe you me, after you spend all your money on the NBN, if you go to sell it you are not going to get your $50 billion back. You are going to have to book an impairment and that loss is going to be massive for the Australian people. It is a crazy idea. You have to look at where your overdraft is right now. You have applied for an extension of your overdraft to $300 billion. You do not have the capacity to go on frolics—it is not there. If you do, it is completely and utterly criminal because you are lumbering your mistakes onto other generations to come after you. Another one is this schoolkiddie's bonus, or whatever you call it. Why? It is $1.3 billion, but it is $1.3 billion that we do not have. It is another $1.3 billion that we have to borrow. It is not our money. It is the good people of China's money and the good people of the Middle East's money; it is not our money. We are going to borrow $1.3 billion just to basically throw it and hope it lands in the appropriate spot. There is no logic behind it, no committee behind it, no peak industry body behind it. There is nothing behind it but a desire of the Treasurer—though probably it was a desire of the Prime Minister—to try to buy favour. That never works. It is the last refuge of a scoundrel, even after patriotism. It just never works. You cannot buy love. Even Mr Thomson could probably tell you that. It is a case where you will get an outcome, but you will not get the affection of the Australian people. Of course they will take the money. People will always take your money, but it does not mean they are going to respect you for it. The question everyone is asking of course is: why didn't you put it into the National Disability Insurance Scheme? That is something that is supported. It is a logical outcome. It is probably a far more appropriate place than to just throw it out the door. The next one is defence. You are throwing out the insurance policy. Looking through the figures with defence, the cut to it against GDP takes us to levels that we have experienced in Australia before. From what we can see, prima facie, it is starting to look like levels we had around 1938. I am not suggesting for one moment that there is something, but it is just foolish. It is foolish for you to let that crucial portfolio go to such a low level. It is reprehensible that you have taken your eye off the ball, because with all this fiasco with Mr Slipper and Mr Thomson happening in the foreground, with Mr Rudd being absolutely carpeted by his colleagues and with the undignified way in which the Prime Minister of Australia carpeted the former Prime Minister, we in the opposition did not need to be an opposition—you do it to yourselves, every day. It is just absurd. It started to reflect that the dignity of office was lost. We knew as soon as the polling started to come out that the Australian people would switch off you, and they have. While that absurdity was happening in the foreground, the absurdity in the background was our finances and the issue that I have always been concerned about, which is debt. It is not a case of just the level of debt but the trajectory of debt and the year-in, year-out, week-in, week-out, structural deficit that was becoming clearly apparent in your cash flows. It continues to this day. You cannot pull wool over people's eyes, borrow week after week $1½ billion, $2 billion, $3 billion and say, 'This is not a problem.' Of course it is a problem; it is a major problem. I remember one week when you borrowed $3 billion. I was trying to think about that with housing. It is 6,000 houses at $500,000 a pop. You have about two-and-a-bit people in a house and that is a count of 13,000 or 14,000 people who you just purchased for the week. This is not logical and you cannot go on. Of course, it is not going to go on. Every promise you make on a financial footing, you break. It is all right giving people bad news—as an accountant, I can tell you that—but you must hit your target. You have to hit your target and when you are out, not slightly out but miles out, that sense of confidence in what you are saying goes. Two years ago you told us that this year we would have a $13 billion deficit. Okay, that is a bad outcome. Then, a year later, you said, 'No, no, we've got it wrong. It's going to be a $22 billion deficit'—just slightly less—and then the year after that you go, 'No, we got it wrong again'. It was a $44 billion deficit. So there is a trend. Each year you are about 100 per cent wrong. Then you say, 'Even though we have got it so drastically wrong, you now must believe us.' Senator Feeney said, 'We have delivered a surplus'. You have not delivered a surplus. That is also another untruth. You have made a promise of a surplus—a promise that will not be able to be ascertained until 30 June 2013, for which the final figures will come in around about September. Between now and then we have to believe your promise. Let us work on that. What other promises has this government made that we can therefore say makes it believable? Senator Ian Macdonald: The carbon tax. Senator JOYCE: You can start with the carbon tax, that is the obvious one. It is a key policy. Or you could start with their deficits, their debt—it does not matter where you go. You could start with the latest one of a pecuniary interest for Mr Thomson. We are trying to find out who knew what in the Labor Party and who paid the bills. You cannot believe anything they say any more. It is one of those absurd things where we have to go through the ritual of asking the questions and then realising that there is nothing they say that you can trust. The honour of office has been desecrated, destroyed and we are just going through a ritual until we get to the election. The election is coming. We went through this ritual in Queensland as well, but at least in Queensland, I would have to say, Ms Bligh had respect. There were people who thought that there was something slightly honourable about the way she was working. Going back to exactly where we are: our gross deposition on market value was $265.84 billion by 30 June this year. It is just fantastic. I do not deny that you did not start with a gross deposition but it was about $58 billion. It has just taken off. Then we have to rely on the trust that you can somehow bring the show back under control. But notice that our gross deposition keeps heading north, even with your own figures. You are telling us about surpluses. The reason you do that is that you are banging things on the capital account but you are not booking your impairment value. So in every way we go around your books they are just a load of absolute tripe. What do Australians see at present? How do they get a sense of confidence? We walk into the restaurant called the Australian Labor Party. We are greeted at the door by the maitre d', the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper, and he sits you down at the table. Out the back you have the cook, the Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Not one thing she says is on the menu ever turns up, not one. There is not one thing you can believe. It does not matter what you buy; it will not turn up. And whatever you buy is going to cost vastly more than is on the menu. Have a look at the accountant, Mr Swan. This restaurant has had the four biggest losses in our nation's history. It now has the biggest debt in our nation's history. The entertainment? I do not know who you put down for the entertainment. I suppose Craig Thomson. The member for Dobell is the entertainment. You can see it is not something that we placed on you. You guys—the Labor Party—placed it on yourselves. You did it to yourselves. The one thing that never lies is debt. Debt never lies. It does not matter how you cut it or dice it, you just have to pay it back. When you are up to $300 billion in debt—no doubt that is where you will get to—then you will come back with some other spurious excuse, just like the three previous times, about why you have to extend it. There will be some weeping and gnashing of teeth about how something went wrong and how we have to borrow more money. There was the ridiculous effort of the finance minister of the Commonwealth of Australia, who could not even nominate the nation's peak debt position. It was excruciating to sit here during question time, having asked the question, and have a palaver of percentages of GDP and net debt. We asked a simple question and we cannot get it. We know that the competency to manage the economy is just not there and that every day the task gets harder. Every day the calibre of the people who are supposed to be managing it comes more under question. We did not put the country in this position; you did. Now you are desperately calling out, saying, 'Tonight, Tony Abbott must tell us how to fix our shop.' It is your shop and you made the mess. It is not a mess we made. The first thing we have to do to fix this mess is to get rid of them. (Time expired)