Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Madam Deputy Speaker. I suspect the conversation reflects the attitude that is now prevailing across the community. No-one can take anything that this government is doing seriously. People have made up their minds. There is a level of crisis of confidence, and no-one is prepared to engage. Even their own backbench, their own frontbench, have not got the commitment to engage in these sorts of substantive issues. Even the Assistant Treasurer has spent most of his time jaw-boning—probably about football or something else.

These issues are not taken seriously, yet they have caused an amazing crisis of confidence in this country. It is absolutely critical that a decision such as the doubling of the withholding tax on investment funds—a decision that some four years ago received great commendation from both us and investors around the world—now without any explanation, they increased it. Now without one scintilla of explanation, they are going to dump it. What other deals are going on behind the scenes? What more responsibility can you have than to explain the actions that you have taken?

You have dumped measures in this budget. If you put it together with yesterday's decision on the indexation of the departure tax, we are now talking a $400 million hole in the budget. What was the surplus? $1.5 billion. What have they now in the space of 12 hours sacrificed? $400 million. Could you explain, Assistant Treasurer, where you are going to get that $400 million to deliver the $1.5 billion surplus?

Nearly one-third of the surplus has gone as a consequence of two decisions taken in less than 24 hours. More than one-third of the surplus is gone. What a joke! And now on the front page of the Financial Review the Reserve Bank is saying that the surplus is not worth the paper it is written on, that the whole thing is a series of money shuffles. What has everyone been saying? Exactly that. And now we have the Reserve Bank saying that not only was this budget never an accurate account; this government is even making that case worse; $400 million has gone out of their budget literally in the last 12 hours. Now we have, on top of that, an addition to the great sovereign risk that this government has created, with endless decisions, and this final one, this one of dumping the 7½ per cent and increasing to 15 per cent the withholding tax.

We need an answer to this. The Assistant Treasurer cannot just sit there with a bland look on his face. Come to this dispatch box and tell us why. Give us one reason why you would dump this, why you would create a black hole in your budget surplus?

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