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

I thank the member for Lyons for his question. Honourable members may recall that at the end of the last sitting week I issued a tally, a table, of existing coalition spending commitments that totalled $15.7 billion that had not been funded in any way by the opposition. They may also recall the Leader of the Opposition’s budget speech in reply on Thursday of the last sitting week in which he only managed to refer to one significant saving, with a grossly inflated estimate of how much it would deliver, and that was the Public Service hiring freeze.

Since that time, we have had a very, very interesting week. First, on the Monday of last week, we had the Leader of the Opposition on the 7.30 Report indicate that we should not treat anything that he says seriously; we should only treat his statements as gospel truth if they are in writing. Then, on the Wednesday, after the Leader of the Opposition had promised that the detail would be delivered by the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, at his traditional budget reply speech at the National Press Club, the member for North Sydney came along and there was a lot of verbiage and bluster but there was no detail in his speech. A few hours later in the day, this elaborate game of pass-the-parcel concluded and finally the shadow finance minister—the fifth shadow finance minister in this term of parliament—the member for Goldstein, launched a list of supposed budget savings, the vast bulk of which do not hit the budget bottom line. Finally, to make the week even more interesting, the member for Goldstein, late on Thursday, put out a press release entitled ‘Tanner’s numbers in tatters’—almost illiterate if not quite. It stated in a press release:

These costings leave in tatters the desperate claims of the Finance Minister, Mr Tanner, that Coalition promises add up to $15.7 billion.

It claimed that only $4.7 billion is the tally of coalition promises. Mr Speaker, as you can imagine, I found this rather interesting and rather puzzling—in fact, I was a bit mystified. How could there be such a big gap, $11 billion or so, between my tally and the opposition’s? The answer was in the fine print in the member for Goldstein’s press release because it contained this ripper phrase:

… other past commitments have been discontinued.

The older members of the chamber will no doubt remember Ronald Ziegler, the famous press spokesman for Richard Nixon who came up with the immortal phrase, ‘That previous statement was inoperative.’ We now have a new equivalent, a new euphemism. It is, ‘That commitment has been discontinued.’ The promise last year to allow small businesses to carry back-tax losses has been discontinued. The commitment of the shadow families minister, the member for Menzies, to get rid of the means-testing initiatives of the government on the baby bonus and the family tax benefits has been discontinued. The superannuation spokesman, the member for Cowper, in a speech only on 19 April this year made a commitment to reverse the government’s tightening of concessional superannuation tax treatment. That one has also been discontinued, not to mention the radical reduction in funding for the Leader of the Opposition’s so-called green army commitment that he made in a speech to the Sydney Institute and the dramatic scale down in funding for the Toowoomba bypass.

What we have is a simple explanation for the discrepancy between the costings that I announced a week and a half ago and what the opposition now says are the costs of their promises. They have junked most of their promises and given us a living example of phoney Tony’s principle: if it was a statement, ignore it; you have got to have it pinned down in writing, in triplicate, and it has got to be there in a document before you should treat it seriously.

There is a common thread across all of these events last week. It is this: panic under pressure. First, we have the Leader of the Opposition refusing to be accountable for anything he says, then we have got the pass-the-parcel game from the Leader of the Opposition to the member for North Sydney to the member for Goldstein, then we have got the phoney savings announcement and then the final nail in the coffin that previous promises have been discontinued. There is a lesson for everyone here and that is that the Leader of the Opposition is too risky, too erratic and too flaky to be trusted with managing the nation’s finances.

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