Mr ABBOTT (12:46 PM) —This is very important legislation and it is quite appropriate that it be given plenty of scrutiny by this House. I know that it is very important to the government. The government would not have brought this forward without very strong reasons which seem good to the government, but the opposition has a wide range of questions and issues which it thinks need to be taken into account before this Federal Financial Relations Bill 2009 and cognate bill are finally dealt with. Australia is obviously in difficult financial circumstances right now, and these bills are part of a range of legislation which the government has put before the House to try to deal with those circumstances. The government is to be commended for the seriousness with which it has taken the current financial circumstances, but it is to be condemned for the fact that so much of the response is about spending money rather than undertaking continued long-term reform that will strengthen the economic base of the country.

It was the British Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan who said, back in the late seventies, that you cannot spend your way out of a recession. What you can do, though—possibly, not certainly—is reform your way out of a recession. That is the problem that this government has. It has turned out to be much better at spending money—money which has been accumulated by the careful husbandry of former Prime Minister John Howard and the member for Higgins, Peter Costello. It has turned out to be much, much better at spending that money than actually doing the hard yards of reform—reform which the former government never shirked. So far, I regret to say, this is a government which has not taken any hard decisions. It is not a tough decision to spend money that someone else has accumulated. That is, in fact, a very easy decision because there is absolutely no-one who will ever object to government money being spent on them or their particular cause. So that, in a nutshell, is why this legislation deserves the important scrutiny of this chamber. That is why a significant number of frontbenchers from the opposition will be forensically analysing the legislation in the course of this debate. I have had great pleasure in trying to at least contextualise the position of the opposition in the debate that we now intend to proceed with.