Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

Inflation is at the highest level that Australia has experienced in 16 years and it is being fuelled by government spending, which is running at a 4½ per cent increase in real terms in the current financial year. Treasury analysis published last week gave us some indication as to why this is the case. It showed that over the past four budgets the former Liberal government virtually had no savings initiatives at all. Only about five per cent of the total new initiatives in the budget over the past four years constituted savings. In other words, in the budgets for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007, roughly 95 per cent was new spending and five per cent was savings. The Treasury document shows, when you get to the 2007 budget, that the savings bar on the graph is so tiny you can barely see it. That is one of the key reasons why we have an inflation problem in this country, and that is one of the problems that this government is committed to tackling.

Unfortunately, not much has changed on the other side. They do not believe that this is a problem. They do not believe there is an inflation problem. The member for Wentworth has said it is all a fairytale. The Leader of the National Party thinks the solution to the problem is to increase spending. And they are still advocating further increases in government spending. Recently we got a very interesting proposal for a new piece of very substantial government spending from the member for Mayo, the last of the Bourbons, in an article in the Adelaide Advertiser headed ‘Build us a beacon’, in which he put forward his view about what the government should be spending its money on. He called on the government to build:

... the most innovative, unique, attractive art museum in the southern hemisphere—

in Adelaide, with:

... a 1000-seat concert hall—

designed by Frank Gehry or Norman Foster; a building that would:

... excite the world in the way presidential monuments like the Pompidou Centre or the Quai Branly museum do in France.

And, of course, he suggested that it should be built in the hills, to keep the riffraff out, as well! The member for Mayo did raise some concerns about the cost, and I quote:

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