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

These provisions restrict the facility for requesting the PBO to cost policies during the caretaker period. It allows costings to be prepared only for policies which have been publicly announced. This means that a Parliamentary Budget Office is no different from the Charter of Budget Honesty provisions, the ones that the Labor Party railed against in 1996 and supported amendments to in 1996. Now they are voting against those amendments. If they go into opposition, they will be crying foul about this. I say to the members of the Labor Party, this is your chance. Should you go into opposition you will be begging for this amendment. And you know what: if we are in government, we just might not give it to you. How about that? The world's greatest Treasurer will not be here so he will not be worrying about it. Who will be the Treasurer? The member for Melbourne Ports will be the Treasurer and he will be begging for this amendment, and he will not get it.

This requires policies to be publicly announced before they have been costed. Let me be very clear about this. The only new information that belongs to the Treasury and the Department of Finance that is published and used by the PBO—published by those departments and used by the PBO—is the pre-election fiscal outlook. So if the Independents have a policy that they take to the Parliamentary Budget Office outside an election period and get it costed, should they choose to send it back to the Parliamentary Budget Office on the basis that it has new data in the pre-election fiscal outlook, their numbers will be published and wrong. So they will now discover the true impact of this decision. It means that the numbers will inevitably be wrong because the numbers the Parliamentary Budget Office uses before the election will inevitably be incorrect after the election is called because of the time difference between MYEFO and the budget itself. So that is great work. It means that no matter what policies go to the PBO, after the election is called the numbers will be incorrect when based against previous work of the Parliamentary Budget Office. So brilliant is this bill as it stands!

The dilemma is significant. So to address this issue, I moved that the words 'publicly announced' should be omitted from subsection 64J(2) and 64J(5). This will allow a parliamentary party or an Independent member to submit policies to the PBO for costing before they have been publicly announced. It will provide a discretion to include or not include a policy in the suite of election policies and will allow the full budgetary impact to be assessed prior to the announcement, and with the PEFO numbers that belong to the Treasury rather than the obsolete numbers which now the Independents, with the Labor Party, are tying this to.

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