Ms BURKE (3:20 PM) —I know it is the first week back and we have all been in party mood, and I expect the government should enjoy it, but occasionally—

Mr Brough —Why would you get a party?

Ms BURKE —I said the government should enjoy it. You should listen occasionally—it would help. I do know that the minister has been attempting to be humorous, but it has failed dismally. However, at least he could have read what the MPI is actually about. It would serve us all if occasionally the government did actually pay attention to these things, and listened and learnt occasionally. The Prime Minister started the election saying, `Who do you trust?' I thought that was a fairly brave move. I listened to him and he kept saying, `Who do you trust?' This is the man who had misled the Australian public time and time again; the man who said there were weapons of mass destruction; the man who said there were children overboard; the man who had said, `Never, ever a GST'; the man who had said, again and yet again, things that we now know to be untruths.

Yet he went into this election saying, `Who do you trust?' and he scared voters—terrified them—into believing that the Labor Party would raise interest rates. Somehow, miraculously, we are in charge of interest rates; we are the ones who control them! Those of us who actually listen and learn and read papers—and the Deputy Prime Minister should be schooled to read papers so that he knows what is going on with his own membership—know it is the Governor of the Reserve Bank who sets interest rates. He sets interest rates on the basis of the current stimulus, the current economic setting in this country. At the moment we have a very good economic setting; there is no disputing it. But it is all built on the back of consumption; it is all built on the back of that plastic fantastic, the credit card: get it out, whip it on.

We are all spending 2.5 per cent more than we earn. Let me repeat that. Each month, most of us are spending 2.5 per cent more than we earn. It is all going on that wonderful credit card: ker-ching, ker-ching, ker-ching! My daughter has the impression that money comes in plastic credit cards, because occasionally when I say, `Mummy can't afford that,' she says, `But you've got those things in your wallet, Mummy.' Everybody is thinking we can all put it on the plastic. It will be on the plastic and somehow, miraculously, we are going to find how to pay it off. That is what this government has led everyone to believe. They have promised $66 billion since last May. That is an awful lot of money. I have been into the vault of the Reserve Bank. I have held a billion-dollar gold bar. It was pretty impressive. I tried to weigh up how I could get it into the handbag, but I could not manage to smuggle it out. I looked at it and thought, `That is amazing!'

Mr Swan —You could have put it on the card!

Ms BURKE —I could have paid off the plastic cards; I could have paid off one of the mortgages. But $66 billion—can you comprehend what that means? Most people cannot. And then in one afternoon they spent $6 billion. I sat and watched the press conference with the Prime Minister doling out money left, right and centre. Everybody was getting some. I did not get any—but everybody else seemed to be getting some. It was not money to projects; it was one-off lump sum payments: $600 per child, $100 to pensioners, $1,000 to carers. GPs got an instantaneous pay rise. I wish I was a member of that union. They seem to be brilliant at getting instantaneous pay rises. It was all there. It was given and given and given. It was an obscene spend of money.

In this election, it was $11 billion. All that will go back into the economy. It will be pump priming going back into the economy. It will be spent on the plastic fantastic, and that is where the pressure will come onto interest rates. Interest rates will have to go up. The Governor of the Reserve Bank has been signalling it. I do not blame him—during an election period it would have been a pretty gutsy move for the Governor of the Reserve Bank to put up interest rates, but he knows the stimulus is there. He knows that the issues are there that must put pressure on him in his role of keeping down inflation to put up those interest rates. He knows it. He has been signalling it for a long time.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank has been out there trying to warn and pressure the public into knowing that we are overspending, that we are overcapitalising on our homes, that we have pumped this economy so much that we have locked the majority of young family members out of ever having the Australian dream. Most young Australian couples coming into the property market now will probably never be able to afford their own home. That is what this government has done. If you are, luckily, inside the market and you have your own home, you are geared to the hilt.

Originally when people had to borrow they had to spend about 20 per cent of their income. When my parents bought their house, they had to spend about 20 per cent of their income. It crept up to 30 per cent of their income. Now people are spending 40 to 50 per cent of their income to service their mortgages, to service their home loans. That is leaving them with 50 per cent of their income to pay their bills and to put food on the table. If the car breaks down, God help you, because there is no hope you are going to have some spare cash to get that car repaired. All that is going into your home loan. So, yes, you are terrified. If there is a marginal move in interest rates, it will come crashing down on those families who have borrowed to the hilt, who are geared to the hilt, who have no room to move.

These families are spending up to 40 per cent of their income on their mortgage, and then there is all the money they have spent on consumables. They have gone down to Harvey Norman and bought furniture for the entire house on hire-purchase. They have believed the stuff that says that you do not have to pay anything back for 12 months. They have forgotten that, in 12 months, you do have to pay it back and you have to pay it back with anywhere between 24 and 36 per cent interest. After the 12 months, they have a lovely house full of brand-new furniture and suddenly the man turns up and says, `I'd really like you to pay some of that back now.' They cannot, and it gets repossessed. They stand in their beautiful house while their furniture is being repossessed.

I have had couples—with both members in full-time employment—come in to me, having to say, `We really need to know where the Salvos are with furniture, because all our stuff has just been repossessed. We've managed to hold onto the flat-screen TV'—which is a bit sad. They have managed to hold onto that and the DVD recorder, because that was a Christmas present. But the fridge has just gone and so has the washing machine—and they have four kids. These people are in full-time work, but they have bought the dream. They have accepted the dream, and the Prime Minister has scared them into believing that it is only this government who can preserve that dream. It is only this government who is trying to destroy it by pump priming this economy with false stimulus—false money that is not there, that was not needed.

It is not good policy. None of it was good policy. We are still going to have a crisis in aged care. There are no new aged care beds. We are still going to have a crisis in our public hospital system: there is no extra money back into our public hospitals. We are still having a crisis in dental care. In my electorate, in the City of Whitehorse, prior to this government coming in, we had got our dental waiting list down to six months. At six months it was still too long. It is now up to four years—four years to go in and get your teeth fixed. And my electorate is the leafy green suburbs of Melbourne. My seat is affluent in lots of respects. It has the highest rate of education in the country. I have a low rate of mortgages, because most people in my electorate have paid theirs off. You cannot buy into my electorate; you could not afford to buy most places in either Box Hill or Mount Waverley if you were a first home buyer. If you were able to, mum and dad probably helped you out.

The other reality is that those first home buyers have massive HECS debts. That is the other thing. Even the Governor of the Reserve Bank has pointed this out: to get new home owners in, you have to get rid of their overhanging debts. My younger brother is a lawyer. He earns quite good money. His wife is a fairly senior public servant. They had to get her parents to go guarantor on their loan, because they both had such massive HECS debts. The bank said to them, `It's all well and good—your incomes are fine—but you have this massive debt.' My little brother was slightly embarrassed turning up to his in-laws to say, `Would you mind going guarantor on the mortgage? Otherwise we're not going to get one.' It was just embarrassing.

And this government is making it worse: billions and billions of dollars pumped in, for what? The Prime Minister's record; nothing else. No other reason. He wants to be the longest serving PM. You cannot really outgo the one who has got the high watermark, but he is going to try his damnedest to be that longest serving PM. We are going to sit here and watch the poor Treasurer wilting a little, I think, because I do not see the PM going in any great hurry. He is liking his historic moment in the sun—but at what cost? I despair.

In some ways it is the best thing that could happen to the Labor Party if interest rates go up and things start coming crashing down, but do we really want that to happen to our people? Do we really want that to happen to people out there who will not be able to cope? Any slight move in interest rates and, because there is so much pressure on those people's lives already, so much pressure on their ability to repay, it will just come crashing down. Access Economics, the IMF, the Reserve Bank and everybody have pointed this out. Every credible economic analyst has said this is not sustainable, it is bad politics and it is bad government. I condemn this government in their first week back for such lousy politics. (Time expired)