Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

The reason I choose PEFO, the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, is that it was used the last time the Treasury and the Department of Finance actually considered the finances of the country and produced the projections without the influence of the Treasurer. I am not convinced that treasurers do have that much influence on the Treasury but the Treasurer Joe Hockey seems to think they did in the Labor years, so I am assuming that they do for him now.

Just before the election, PEFO was done in a period where the government and the opposition were separate and Treasury and Finance put together the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Again, when you look at PEFO, the deficit for 2014-15 is actually higher than PEFO. They have increased the deficit. You can see what they have done. They have cut billions from the vulnerable through cuts to family payments, through the GP tax, through tax increases that they promised they would not make et cetera. But they have spent it in other ways. There is $20 billion on paid parental leave. They reversed the tax cuts for the high-income earners through superannuation, so there is quite a bit there. They have given enormous tax cuts to the miners through abolishing the minerals resource rent tax and of course enormous tax cuts to the biggest polluters if they manage to abolish the price on carbon. There are quite a few there.

Essentially, they have cut from the poorest section of the community and given back to areas that they obviously see as a priority. This is a clear example of a twisted priority, that you would cut so much from the vulnerable in society for no improvement in the 'debt and deficit disaster' as they call it at all. In fact, it is worse than it was in PEFO. So every time the Treasurer gets up and talks about these harsh measures and 'We all needed it, we had to do this—we had to cut $5,000 from single-income families earning $50,000 because we had to put our budget back on track,' remember there is no improvement in the budget position because of these harsh measures to the most vulnerable in our society. These broken promises—promise after promise after promise broken—for no gain in the financial position of this country. For zero—in fact, slightly worse, a 'sliver worse', to use the words that they used when they were in opposition. It is a fraud, it is a broken promise, it is based on lies and it is a deception of the highest order.

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