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

I thank the member for Corangamite for his question. The government has put in place a tough budget with a strong surplus of nearly $22 billion with the primary purpose of putting downward pressure on inflation and interest rates. That is the critical focus of the government’s fiscal policy. It is true to say that there are threats to the government’s fiscal policy, primarily coming from the opposition, especially manifested through their control of the Senate for the remainder of this month. The immediate response from the opposition to the government’s budget was to announce a range of positions and commitments that, had they been implemented, would have blown a $22 billion hole in the government’s budget surplus over four years. The opposition’s position has been changing on almost a daily basis. Almost every time the Leader of the Opposition hops up to speak there is another announcement, another statement and another indication of more free money for anybody who wants it. It is getting so bad that it is pretty hard to keep up.

Just when I thought it could not get any worse, lo and behold—you can always rely on them!—up pops the National Party. We know that the Leader of the Opposition indicated that he intends to cut the fuel excise—a promise he will never be able to deliver—then last week we had the member for Aston indicate that he wanted to double the cut in fuel excise that the Leader of the Opposition was promising. Not to be outdone, though, on the weekend, the Leader of the National Party indicated he wanted to quadruple the amount. Needless to say he gave no indication of where the money might come from, no indication of how many billions of dollars a year or how big a hole would be blown through the surplus, and no indication of what savings initiatives or indeed tax increases would be put in place to pay for it. After all, this is the man who indicated in February that the solution to Australia’s inflation problem was for the government to spend more money; this is the leader of the party that gave us Regional Partnerships. So perhaps we should not be that surprised. I have something of a soft spot for the National Party.

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