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

I thank the member for Wentworth for his question. It appears that he has changed his position on this year’s budget yet again. So we now have a third position on the budget—it appears that the 2008 budget is now a rather good budget. But we will take that on board. We are happy for today’s endorsement. It may well change tomorrow, but we will take that on board. I notice the trickiness in the question in that he referred to two different indicators. What he did not mention is that if we use the GDP deflator indicator it would show that government spending in this year’s budget is actually going to fall in real terms. So you choose one indicator when it suits you, but you do not want to choose it when it actually suits the government. What a remarkable coincidence.

What is most astonishing about this performance is that this question is coming from the party which says that this budget is expansionary, that the budget is a high-spending budget and yet that the government should be loosening the purse strings to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. It should add $22 billion to net government spending. It should reduce the surplus by $22 billion over those years. That is the position of the opposition.

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