Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Deputy Chairman , Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

So far, as my friend and colleague next to me says. The Treasurer will stand up tonight, deliver a budget surplus and say: 'Believe I will hit the target. Believe me that, for once, I'll hit the target.' Maybe he will say, 'Believe me, I'll get near the target.'

As some of you know, the History Channel on Foxtel is a great source of knowledge and inspiration if you ever get home after a function. There was a great show a while ago on the precision needed for the first moon landing. The maths and all the work had to be spot on. Too fast and there would be a huge problem. The wrong calculation and the astronauts, instead of going into orbit around the moon so that they could land on it, would bounce off and fly into outer space never to be recovered. In fact, if they had got it wrong they would still be out there. I could not help thinking, 'Thank God the Treasurer wasn't working at NASA.' Can you imagine it? 'Near enough's good enough,' I was about to say, but we do not even get near enough with this Treasurer. We have seen in the days leading up to the budget, as the shadow Treasurer rightly pointed out, that he 'doesn't know whether he is Santa Claus or the Christmas Grinch'.

Years and years ago when I had a lot more time on my hands as a teenager, I used to watch most test cricket matches. There was an opening batsmen for Australia, who I am sure was a great bloke, called Graeme Wood.

Opposition members: Western Australian.

A West Australian; there you go. He went through a bad patch where he ran out most guys at the other end. He would play a shot and he would have a combination of yes, no and wait, in rapid succession, and it always ended the same way—with the opposing batsman standing next to him at the other end of the pitch. That is what we have seen with this Treasurer. He says it is going to be a tough budget; that is his script. The problem with his script is: it is the same script he uses every single year. On 1 April 2008 he said, 'It's going to be a tough budget.' Before the 2009 budget, in an interview on radio 2UE, he said, 'This is going to be a tough budget.' In 2010 the government said, through Senator Sherry, 'It's going to be a tough budget.' Again this week we have heard the Treasurer say, 'It's going to be a tough budget,' as he has handed out cash in one direction and clawed it back from another. Yes, no, wait.

The other thing we are going to see in this budget is fiddles galore. We have seen that already in some of their predictions. As the shadow minister for finance pointed out a few weeks back, in March, if you look at the spending pattern over the forward estimates there is a desperate desire to drag spending forward into this year and to push it back beyond the next financial year so that the Treasurer can stand here tonight and say, 'I am projecting a surplus.' One example is the Energy Security Fund. Here is the pattern of spending over the forward estimates: $1,000 million in 2013-14, the same in 2014-15, but apparently—for reasons that are not obvious—the purpose of the Energy Security Fund almost evaporates in the year 2012-13. It goes from $1,000 million to $1 million. Just for one year: a dip down and a dip back up. And that is only what we know to date.

What Australians can be sure of, unfortunately, is that whatever this Treasurer says tonight it will not be the outcome. Whatever he says tonight, in a little over three hours, it will not be the outcome. The unfortunate fact about the economic management of this government is that incompetence in the ministry and incompetence across the government is leading to a lack of confidence throughout the Australian economy. There is only one way to restore economic responsibility to Australia and that is with a change of government.

See this speech in context