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

I return to the point I was making. The budget rules the government put in place put a real constraint on spending. They require governments and prospective governments to match spending with savings. We have had a sequence of dog-ate-my homework excuses about when we are going to get some serious savings and when we are going to get some explicit commitments about how the opposition is going to pay for all the promises it is putting forward, but thus far we have had very few commitments. By this stage in 2007, the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister, had $3 billion worth of explicit savings commitments out there, virtually all of which have since been delivered.

I have a couple of final tips for the Leader of the Opposition. Investments do not hit the bottom line and therefore cannot be used for spending. So, whether it is the Australian Rail Track Corporation equity investment—

See this speech in context