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

That is right. There are two people who are very glad you are going, Peter, and they are both on that side. In the same interview with Laurie Oakes eight days ago, the member for North Sydney accused the government of ‘spending record levels on advertising’. I thought I had entered a parallel universe on that Sunday morning. It was early in the morning and I was a bit concerned about my state of mind. I thought I had better check the facts. The facts are these: in calendar 2007 total spending on government campaign advertising, $254 million; in the 2008 calendar year total spending on government campaign advertising, $87 million—in other words, barely a third of the record level set by the former government of which the shadow Treasurer was a member.

In conclusion, I would like to draw the House’s attention to the shadow Treasurer’s solution to the problem that he believes is there with government spending and borrowing crowding out the private sector. He says, ‘The government should spend less money.’ Now, there is a slight problem with that. There is something of a problem as those opposite have yet to nominate a single savings proposal in 18 months—not one. They say they would continue with the government’s stimulus payments were they in office tomorrow. They continue to block government savings initiatives in the Senate and, of course, they keep dropping out expensive new promises on top of that. So for them, as the opposition, to suggest that the government should be spending less money would be slightly more credible were they to actually act in opposition in the same way as we did and put forward savings proposals, as the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and I did in opposition prior to the 2007 election. It is time that the opposition put the shadow Treasurer out of his misery. I used to think it was crook that they had a shadow Treasurer who nicked other people’s lines. I have now worked out there is one thing even worse. That is someone who makes up his own.

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