Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade and Competitiveness) Share this | Hansard source

The Queensland government is cutting the number of TAFEs by half, the Victorian government is slashing TAFE funding by $300 million and of course just today this has been fully endorsed by the Leader of the Opposition when he said: 'I respect the job they are doing. I work closely with them as far as I can. But they are dealing with their problems at the state level and I will seek to deal with federal problems at our level.' You have the Leader of the Opposition endorsing the cuts and saying that he too would engage in savage cuts to government programs.

We know the size of the problem, because the shadow finance minister indicated that there is indeed a $70 billion funding crater. That was confirmed again today by the shadow Treasurer. The shadow finance minister further said to Business Spectator, in August: 'I have on my desk 49 policy documents, with covers'—that is nice —'and the costings.' So they have the costings and they are concealing them. We know that they are deliberately concealing the costings of where these savage cuts are coming from because he said at the same interview that they would not make the same mistake as they made with Fightback! and set out those policies before an election. Indeed, the device of an audit commission is the device of choice of the coalition. It is the device that Campbell Newman used to conceal the cuts to education, to training and to the workforce in Queensland. And we know that this opposition has said no to the charter of budget honesty, which was designed by former Treasurer Peter Costello. They will not go to the Parliamentary Budget Office. The shadow Treasurer obviously is going to hire a retired Mosman bookkeeper to put a little ruler over the costings and then say that it all adds up. But in truth they have in mind the same device—

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