Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Please don’t fret, but I nearly did—when I heard the Treasurer say on AM that we used to be a big spending government. Let me tell you: this is coming from the biggest spending Treasurer since we rolled tanks across the Western Desert in World War Two. Here we go: this Treasurer inherited 24 per cent of GDP in expenditure and he has taken it up to 28.6 per cent. Even over the forward estimates to 2013, he is at 26.4 per cent, a full 2½ per cent higher than what he calls our ‘drunken expenditure’. So here we have a Treasurer giving drunken sailors a bad name. He is going to new levels of expenditure and the problem is he cannot fund it. That is why the Labor Party does not want to talk about tax. The Labor Party is not a tax-reforming party; it is a high tax party. Look at what Labor does, not just at what it says. It is the party of higher taxes. It is the party of unnecessarily high interest rates. It is the party that closes down the enterprise that keeps Australia going.

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