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

Unfortunately, there is, for the member for North Sydney, a very simple explanation as to why the figures in the budget papers show surpluses over the period he is referring to—figures like one per cent of GDP, 1.4 per cent of GDP, 1.6 per cent of GDP or whatever the figure may be—and that is that the figure against which the percentage will be calculated in due course will not be GDP for the year 2009-10; it will be GDP for the year 2019-20.

This is not the first occasion that the member for North Sydney has been decidedly sloppy with his attention to detail and figures. We note immediately that in the response to the budget he claimed that two-thirds of the peak in net debt that the government is projecting in the budget was covered by new spending. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention a very important fact—that he did not include all of the government’s savings measures in his calculations. And, naturally, he made no reference to the point that the total amount of net debt projected was actually lower than the total amount of revenue loss projected over the same period as a result of the global recession.

Finally, I would like to quote something that the member for North Sydney said at the National Press Club last week:

When Lindsay promised to bring together all the IT departments under a review and said there was going to be great savings out of consolidation, I notice, and I might be wrong, that in the budget papers there was not one dollar of savings. Out of all that IT bluster and bluff, there was not one dollar of savings.

Well, I have bad news for you, Member for North Sydney: you are wrong—you are very wrong. On page 50 of the Updated Economic and Fiscal Outlook papers published in February—which, if you were a decent shadow Treasurer, you would be familiar with—there is in fact a set of figures that indicate that there will be savings of over $400 million over four years from the IT savings that the member for North Sydney referred to. If a member of the opposition aspires to be the Treasurer of the nation, they have to do their homework. Being Treasurer is more than just breakfast TV shows and one-liners. It involves detail, it involves rigour and it involves hard work. We have gone from a shadow Treasurer who copies her work from others to one who makes things up! That is the standard of performance you get from the Liberal Party in economic debate in this country. If you cannot get your facts right in opposition, you are not fit to run the nation’s finances.

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