Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I will come to that. Then the Treasurer said that he wanted to quote an ‘eminent authority’ on this, and he was talking about an eminent authority on economic reform. Who was he talking about—himself? No, not at that time. Was he talking about the Prime Minister? Certainly not. In May 2007 he said that the eminent authority was the Secretary of the Treasury. What has happened in 12 months? Why is Ken Henry no longer the ‘eminent authority’? The Treasurer, then the opposition Treasurer, said that the government’s pre-eminent economic adviser was the Secretary of the Treasury. Now he has been relegated to the back bench and is no longer the pre-eminent authority for economic advice.

It is capped off by a piece written by the then Leader of the Opposition, now Prime Minister, when before the election he described the role of Treasury in the heart of government. He said:

The commonwealth Treasury is no ordinary agency of state . . .

And then he went on to say:

As a former Commonwealth public servant, I know—

this is the Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister—

from experience that the Treasury is staffed with the most competent policy elite that can be attracted to the Australian Public Service.

The only thing that the Prime Minister knows about economics is that the best economic advisers in the country are within the Treasury. He said that it is ‘no ordinary agency of state’. It is not advice that you take when you feel like it and you disregard it when you have got a cheap stunt that has to grab the evening news and the next headline. The Prime Minister said that he knew ‘from experience’—the only experience that he has got in this area—that the Treasury is ‘staffed with the most competent policy elite that can be attracted to the Australian Public Service’. And now he is trashing their reputation, ignoring their advice, wilfully disregarding Treasury and the other economic advisers within government.

In this article the Leader of the Opposition, now Prime Minister, went on to say that Treasury:

... are part of a tradition that sees their role as the continuing custodians of the nation’s long-term economic wellbeing, providing robust advice to the government of the day, irrespective of the political complexion of that government.

That is what they said before the election. Now when they are in a jam and their national FuelWatch scheme is unravelling before our very eyes, they start trashing the Public Service. The minister for finance dismissed them the other day as ‘fat cats’. Don’t think that didn’t get around the Public Service! The Treasurer has dismissed their advice as ‘academic’ and then today—this was a doozy—we had the Assistant Treasurer revealing that the four departments that advised the government against the implementation of the fundamentally flawed FuelWatch had been ‘captured’ by the vested interests of the big oil companies. What is the Prime Minister going to do about his four departments that the Assistant Treasurer says have been captured by the vested interests of big oil companies? This is what the government is saying: anybody who disagrees with their fundamentally flawed FuelWatch scheme has been captured by the vested interests of big oil.

That means Ken Henry and the Treasury; Terry Moran and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet; and all those people in the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism. They are all captured by the vested interests of big oil companies. This is how silly the government are appearing now. This is how ridiculous their argument has become. Why do they not just admit that the evidence is overwhelmingly against FuelWatch and that their own departments have pointed out the fundamental flaws?

The Treasurer used to have on his website the statement that the coalition would ignore Treasury advice at the economy’s peril. That is what he used to think—that you would ignore Treasury advice at the economy’s peril. And now this government, in its quest for cheap populism, for the five-second grab, for a cheap headline instead of cheap petrol, is ignoring the very advice that it says puts the economy at its peril. This scheme is fundamentally flawed and should not be introduced nationally. (Time expired)

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