Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Little did the Australian public know when they turned on the television last Tuesday night for the budget speech that in fact the speech had been pulped and hurriedly replaced with a magic show. That is the way it certainly seemed to me. Instead of a conservative and sensible ‘live within our means’ budget of the sort we were so used to between 1996 and 2007, we saw a 30-minute performance chock full of spin-doctoring, wild inconsistencies, broken promises, unbelievable forecasts, chicanery, illusions, smoke and mirrors and really outright trickery. After sitting through it, I wondered whether we had seen the birth of another famous illusionist, a man to join the ranks of Houdini, David Copperfield, Penn and Teller and others. I present to you the Great Swan, the great illusionist—or perhaps the not-so-great Swan—with his lovely assistant, Kevin.

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