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

I thank the member for Longman for his question. Today’s national account figures underline the importance of the government’s strategy to push back against the very powerful negative pressures that are coming to bear on the Australian economy. Central to that, of course, is the government’s strategy to strengthen our commitment to investing in infrastructure. A critical part of that, of course, is the establishment of the nation-building funds. That legislation is part way through this parliament and is before the Senate at the moment.

The Liberal opposition have moved a variety of misconceived amendments to the government’s legislation which would seriously undermine the government’s strategy, yet again appearing to try and walk both sides of the street and ostensibly support what the government is seeking to do while in practice drastically undermining the whole scheme. I cite just one example: the attempt by the opposition to give the Senate the power to disallow money going to the funds would seriously undermine the Future Fund’s ability to manage the investment of these funds because it would reduce the prospective time spans in which it would know the amounts of money that it had at hand to invest. That would inevitably alter the investment strategy and would, over the longer term, undermine returns available to those funds. This is clearly something the opposition do not understand. It is something they did not do when they were establishing the Future Fund—which was set up on an equivalent basis and has proved to be the model on which these funds are being established—at least with respect to the investment processes. This demonstrates, along with a number of the other amendments, that the Liberals do not have a proper, sound understanding of economic management principles.

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