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

There is nothing uglier than a squirming greenie. Seriously, that was really awful! How embarrassing it is that a party which prided itself on transparency argued for the FOI laws and now seeks to defy the FOI laws! This is a protection racket by the government. The government is preventing the release of government funded costings of Greens policies. Let us get this right: on the basis that these documents are cabinet in confidence, the government is refusing to release documents which were submitted by the Greens to Treasury and which were costed by the Public Service. The last time I looked, the Greens were not in the cabinet. What hypocrisy this is from the member for Hunter and the member for Chifley and all these other people feigning anger at the Greens!

My colleague had a wonderful quote from Mark Butler, who said the other day on Sky News Agenda that he believes support for the Greens will 'taper off as people become more accustomed or get a better appreciation of the Greens party policies'. Here is a member of the government saying 'what we want is transparency' whilst the Treasurer and his own government run a protection racket to prevent the Greens policies from being released. Then there was the sanctimonious lecture from this weak and incompetent Treasurer saying, 'How dare you people raise the issue of our $120 billion budget black hole! You've got to put your policy proposes to the Parliamentary Budget Office.' He does not believe in transparency—he will not even release the Greens policies which have been costed by his own department—yet he seeks to give us a lecture about transparency.

If you listen carefully you can hear the rumble of Senators Christine Milne and Lee Rhiannon up in the Senate, spinning on the spot at the thought that they have their own representative in this place—in the House of Representatives—standing up to oppose transparency in relation to the Greens' own policies.

What a fraud you are, sir; what a fraud! And you will suffer at the next election because we do not back frauds. We do not provide preferences to frauds. From our perspective, this represents everything about the inconsistency of this government—a government that is weak and insipid, led by a Greens representative who is weak and insipid and headed up by an acting Prime Minister who is weak and insipid. And why? Because they do not want to deal with the truth. The truth is their sworn enemy. Transparency is their enemy. And I wonder how the member for Lyne is going to vote on this motion. Let's call him the sun god! I wonder how the sun god is going to vote on this motion. After all, he wanted to let the sunshine in. So he is himself the sun god of this parliament. Let him shine his light into the dark halls of the cabinet, where there is a Greens-Labor Party coalition acting to prevent the disclosure of information that apparently is so important to the destiny of the nation that it cannot be released, even though the Greens themselves are not in the government—or in the cabinet.

Oh what a joke! But we get a little tinker of what the Greens are really up to in partnership with the government. A little tinker came when Bob Brown went out and announced that he was advocating change to the treatment of fringe benefits tax for motor vehicles. He had it costed by the government, then released the policy and, lo and behold, the government adopted it in the budget. So now we know that there are 12 policy proposals that have been seriously costed by the Treasury and that the government and the Greens refuse to release. One of them, perhaps—we do not know—was the Greens' proposal at the last election to have a carbon tax of $23 a tonne. But of course we know that the government has a $120 billion budget black hole of at least that amount, just on its new spending promises. Take out the expected revenue falls from the dropping commodity prices, the expected revenue falls because profit season has been particularly poor this year, and other losses of revenue, including a drop in the number of people who are looking for work, and it is still a $120 billion hole to fill.

So you go back to what the Greens promised at the last election and say, 'Well, where do we start?' How about death duties? That was a Greens policy at the last election. And how about estate tax? How much would that cost? Why wouldn't the Labor Party use that, in partnership with the Greens, to start funding their $120 billion black hole? Or the company tax rate, up to 33 per cent? That was a Greens policy as well. Or how about a 50 per cent personal income tax bracket? That was a Greens policy as well. Then there are higher tariffs on four-wheel-drive vehicles, means testing for first home owner grants and the elimination of personal and business tax concessions. And it went on: road congestion charges—that's another cracker. These are the things that you obviously go to the Treasury to get costed if you are in the business of implementing your policies. And they were, because we know of the policies the Greens took to the last election. The weak Labor Party, the party led by a person with no principles at all, just did what the Greens told them to do and adopted a carbon tax of $23 a tonne. And now the government has used all its resources to prevent the disclosure of what should be publicly available information—used by the Greens, costed by public servants—to determine the policy of the nation. It is a disgrace. You are all hypocrites, entirely hypocrites, having this fake, pretend anger at the Greens. They are your business partners. They are your bedfellows. You use them and they use you, and you are running a protection racket for each other.

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