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

I thank the member for Shortland for her question. The global financial crisis and recession has knocked a big hole—about $210 billion—in the government’s revenue. That has necessitated borrowing to enable us to protect the Australian economy. We have set out a tough set of rules to enable us to return the budget to surplus, but it is great irony that the biggest obstacle to returning the budget to surplus is in fact the group of people who carry on the most in public about how important it is to return the budget to surplus, and of course I refer to the opposition.

In spite of all of their rhetoric and posturing about debt and deficit, you need to look at what they do—their behaviour. Here is just a sample: blocking reform of Commonwealth dental programs, savings that the government in opposition committed to make—blocking that in the Senate; blocking reforms to the private health insurance rebate and thereby knocking out $1.9 billion in savings from the government’s budget; and, most recently, demanding that the government adopt the Frontier Economics model of a carbon pollution reduction scheme, which would add an additional billion dollars plus to the budget deficit by 2020 were that to occur.

But today we have seen a further manifestation of their behaviour in this regard and, indeed, a further manifestation of their coherence. The behaviour I refer to was seen at a press conference by the member for Dickson, who indicated that, contrary to the commitment made at the Press Club on 20 May by the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, the opposition are now preparing to also block in the Senate changes to the Medicare safety net—changes which would result in savings of $450 million to the budget. These changes are necessitated by the huge amounts of money that have been flowing to a tiny group of specialists—on average, $4.5 million each out of the public purse to the top 10 per cent of specialists. And it has been indicated today by the member for Dickson that the opposition are contemplating blocking these changes.

We have to ask the question here: who is in charge over there? We have had the phoney tough guy, the member for North Sydney, saying, ‘Don’t worry; we’re going to support all these savings,’ and yet today the member for Dickson has indicated that the opposition may possibly block them in the Senate. The ‘whose in charge?’ question was today illuminated a bit further by the extraordinary performance of the member for O’Connor and the Leader of the Opposition. We have seen them walking out, we have seen them walking back in and we have seen the member for O’Connor summons the Leader of the Opposition over to the back bench to get some instructions—an extraordinary rabble performance. Some leaders are arrogant, some are weak and some are rash, but this leader of the opposition has the trifecta. For the first time in Australian political history, we have a leader of the opposition who, all in one, is arrogant, weak and rash at the same time.

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