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

I again thank the member for Canberra for her question. It is important that we have clear and precise commitments and indeed commentary with respect to the public finances in order to maintain public confidence. Unfortunately we are getting exactly the opposite from the new opposition leader and the new, fourth in this term, shadow finance minister. The opposition says that the deficits projected in the budget as a result of the global financial crisis are too big and the debt that is commensurate with that is too high. But they continue to block major savings initiatives in the Senate such as the private health insurance rebate reforms which would save $9½ billion over the next 10 years, and of course they have made huge new spending commitments in their con job on climate change. Those spending commitments are in fact much larger than the opposition understand because, if they are to meet the target they have identified, according to Department of Climate Change calculations they would have to spend almost three times the amount of money that they are projecting. They would have to spend approximately $27 billion over that 10-year period, not the $10 billion that they concede. So there is a giant $27 billion hole in their budget calculations on top of the $9½ billion dollars that they are already blocking in the budget savings that the government has put forward. It is no wonder that the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, suggested that the Leader of the Opposition’s approach to climate change might cost as much as $50 billion, and it is no wonder it was repudiated by the former Leader of the Opposition.

It is interesting that these days the primary advocate for the opposition on economic policy issues appears not to be the shadow Treasurer; it seems to be shadow finance minister, Senator Barnaby Joyce. He has had a lot of interesting things to say. I know from long personal experience that it is not easy to get a front-page headline, to be the lead story on the front page of a major newspaper, when you are shadow finance minister. Senator Joyce has managed that several times.

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