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

I would just like to remind the House of a few examples of the problems that the member for North Sydney has with respect to accuracy and coherence. He claimed the budget papers showed that the government would need eight years of two per cent of GDP plus surpluses to pay off debt as projected, unfortunately neglecting to point out that in order for that to be true there would be zero growth in GDP for 10 years. In other words, he forgot that GDP grows over time, as projected in the budget. In a debate on Lateline with me he claimed that the current account deficit never hit six per cent of GDP under the Howard government. Guess what it was when we took office, when we inherited government from the previous government? It was well over six per cent of GDP.

The day after the budget the member for North Sydney claimed that the Howard government had saved all of the windfall money from the mining boom, something that even Treasury research at the time demonstrated was completely untrue. After the budget, the member for North Sydney claimed that two-thirds of the projected deficits could be explained by the government’s spending, conveniently neglecting to put in the equation a number of very substantial government savings measures. He just happened to overlook those parts of the equation.

Recently, the member for North Sydney and, indeed, the Leader of the Opposition have been claiming that projected government borrowing—not actual government borrowing yet, but projected government borrowing over a number of years—is putting upward pressure on global interest rates that, in turn, is increasing interest rates in Australia, when Australian government borrowing as a fraction is 0.001 of total global government borrowing. He has also accused me of not including, within the budget, projections for IT savings which I have talked up at some considerable length, failing to notice that in the budget update, the Updated Economic and Fiscal Outlook published in February—which he should, as shadow Treasurer, have read—there is in fact a statement of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of savings from the IT changes that the government is putting in place.

These are just the highlights, or the lowlights. But there is of course a wider picture that, soon, the opposition and the shadow Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition are going to have to start filling in. The shadow Treasurer has said that the solution to Australia’s economic problems is quite simple: ‘The government should spend less money.’ Unfortunately, the actions of the opposition, the positions they are adopting, their behaviour in the Senate all point in the other direction. They have not yet announced a single savings proposal—not one. They continue to block government savings initiatives in the Senate. The shadow Treasurer has indicated that they would continue with the government stimulus initiatives. And they keep making expensive new promises into the bargain.

We are now beyond the halfway mark in the parliamentary cycle and the business end of the season is approaching. The time when the opposition can get away with loose rhetoric, inaccuracies and ‘facts’ that are incorrect in the economic critique of the government’s position is rapidly running out. We are going to hold the opposition to account on its rhetoric. We are going to hold the member for North Sydney to account on his rhetoric as we look forward to the time when the Turnbull opposition fronts up to the next election with the list of spending cuts, the list of savings, the list of cuts to programs and the list of increased taxes that it is proposing to put in place, if elected to office, in order to fulfil the position that it is adopting today. That is the implication of the opposition’s position; that is where they are heading. They are heading for a collision with reality. It is coming sooner than they think. We are looking forward to the time when they have to specify exactly what they are going to do for Australia.

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