Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It is my pleasure to support this matter of public importance by the Leader of the Nationals. I tried to listen to every word that the previous speaker uttered. There was a touch of verbal anaesthetic there, I have got to say. It was like listening to a lawnmower going over wet grass. With all his bluff and bluster and all his histrionics that those opposite have to put up with on a daily basis, you did a good job, members of the Labor Party backbench, of smiling painfully on cue. But once again he still could not bring himself to mention the $58 billion deficit in the budget.

Here two weeks ago today it was budget day. The Labor Party caucus were preparing to be briefed on the budget. When you look at the language we have had from those opposite, the conduct of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, and you measure the extent to which they have gone out of their way not to level with the Australian people, this last three weeks has really begun to show the true side of the Labor Party. Before the budget we had the astonishing use of language, with ‘six years of temporary deficits’—’temporary’! In budget week the Treasurer and the Prime Minister did not blush when they talked about ‘temporary’ and ‘six years’ in the same sentence. Imagine getting a temporary car when you get your car serviced and having it for six years. Imagine a road being temporarily closed for six years—although my colleague the member for Cook points out that this does happen in New South Wales. I thought to myself: where would the Labor Party have got this language, because they are so programmed? Did someone just think of it or did they delve back into their history? What has come to my attention is that the Labor Party, fond of their history as they are, indeed delved back into their history. Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, were not the inventors of the term ‘temporary’. Actually the inventors of it were Gough Whitlam and Rex Connor during the loans affair, where they said in an executive minute—that famous minute that summed up so much the economic incompetence of the Labor Party, that saw them thrown from office in 1975—that the borrowings would be for ‘temporary purposes’. Now we are starting to get a true picture of the Labor Party.

Then we had the extraordinary revelation of the Treasurer not being able to utter the budget deficit figure during his speech. A budget is four documents and a speech, and all these documents come down to the outcome. They all add up to one figure—the deficit or the surplus—and he could not mention it on budget night. When the Labor Party were briefed on the budget just before the budget speech it is now quite clear that they were not briefed on the figure either. There has been a lot of criticism of the member for Petrie, but she cannot say what she has not heard or what she does not know because the Treasurer did not tell his own people and deliberately omitted the budget deficit figure from the speech. As he did so, it just demonstrated the extent to which this government will go to conceal the truth from the Australian people—and those opposite know it. They know it. They know it is wrong. We have seen that time and time again.

Instead of being issued in caucus with facts and figures on the budget, what we have seen in the week after the budget is that they were all issued with hard hats and fluorescent vests! That is what we have seen all over the country. The extent to which this government will go to bring on a stunt and avoid the substance is breathtaking. This is not a government; it is a stunt factory. That is all we see from those opposite. For 100 years the budget papers were as you would expect: plain old, boring, black-and-white budget papers. Then, when this government got elected, you can see one of their biggest decisions—they probably spent the day on it—was: ‘Let’s make them blue.’ You can imagine, can’t you, the Labor strategist saying, ‘What’s the really important thing to do?’

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