David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer ) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Speaker, can I take the opportunity to congratulate you on your elevation to high office. Congratulations.

It is a great pleasure to be able to speak to this matter of public importance. It is a shame that the member for North Sydney, after having posed so many questions, is now about to walk away without hearing the answers. But I relish the opportunity to respond to the invitation from the member for North Sydney to debate this matter of public importance. I find it extraordinary that he would bring forward a matter of public importance that dealt with the need for accurate information on budgetary positions. Of all of the audacious things the member for North Sydney could do, this is right up there. I say it is audacious because he is not a man who has a good track record when it comes to transparency and accuracy in relation to information that is brought forward on budget costings.

What am I referring to? Let me begin with the budget-in-reply speech that, we all recall, the Leader of the Opposition gave in 2010, where he gave us no detail, no indication of any of the cuts that he was going to make—the cuts that he would have to make, and ultimately cuts that he at least put on the table before the 2010 election: cuts to education and to health. But then we had the member for North Sydney front up to the National Press Club. He told us, 'Well, I'd love to be able to tell you where all these savings are going to come from, but you'll have to wait; we'll tell you next week.' Then we had the member for Goldstein, who is in the chamber at the moment, come forward. He had that wonderful press conference where he had to go through and try and do the hard work to explain where they were going to find the costings. It culminated of course with that wonderful conclusion to the press conference where the advisor up the back was signalling as though he was about to slit his neck—'Cut it off! Cut it off! Enough questions; enough scrutiny; enough accountability. That's the end of it: we don't want to have to answer those questions.'

Anyway, fast-forward through to the 2010 election. They went off to the election. This is the mob that told us for all those years about the Charter of Budget Honesty—we should all kneel down at the Charter of Budget Honesty, because that is the only way we can determine that a party heading into an election is committed to actually delivering fiscal responsibility! So you would have thought, having been lectured about the significance of the Charter of Budget Honesty for all those years, that when they had an opportunity—in fact, their first opportunity in opposition—to go to an election and to put their plans on the table, to get them properly costed, having genuflected at the alter of the Charter of Budget Honesty for all those years, they would be able to walk down the aisle and do the same thing in the lead-up to the 2010 election. But did they? No, they did not. They went off and got some dodgy costings from a set of accountants that were subsequently reprimanded because the costings were that shonky. The member for North Sydney at the time was asked: 'Was this an audit—

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