Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It is appropriate that we have a third reading debate on this matter because more evidence has come to light in the Senate inquiry—which occurred last week on Friday—since the House last met. There are two matters, in particular, that go to the revenue—the costing involved in this and passing it through to consumers. The House is familiar with the issue around the costings and the fact that, a short time after the budget was brought down, the government has a rather large black hole on its hands. The Treasurer has tried all sorts of excuses to deal with this, including moving the goal post between fiscal and underlying cash, but, of course, one of them has been that Macquarie is yet to report. It is true that Macquarie Bank is yet to report to the Australian Stock Exchange. They can report at any time of their choosing, but they did give evidence before the Senate inquiry on Friday and indicated a post-tax liability.

That post-tax liability leaves a very significant shortfall for the government. In fact, if you take the big four banks plus Macquarie Bank on a post-tax contribution, you get to just over one billion dollars—$1.015 billion—which falls significantly short of what the Treasurer told us in his budget speech. If you take that over the forward estimates, you get to a $2 billion black hole in the Treasurer's budget. This comes to the matter of competence. This is the point we make. We sometimes get pleas for more bipartisanship, but, when the Labor Party offers the government bipartisanship, time and time again we see the implementation being bungled. Although I will confine my remarks to this particular bill, the same applies to a matter that was just dealt with in the other House in relation to the GST and low-value threshold, which we will deal with later.

The fact of the matter is it is now incontrovertibly the case that the Treasurer has a black hole on his hands. It would just be better if the Treasurer admitted it and if he was just honest about it and if he just said, 'Yes, that was the best estimate at the time. We were working in the dark, we were working in a hurry and we got it a little bit wrong.' We would accept that. In fact, he might get some points for his honesty. But, alas, the Treasurer continues to deny the fact that the black hole exists. And the black hole is, if I could put it this way, in black and white. The black hole is in black and white—there for all to see. It is in evidence before the Senate inquiry. It is in the disclosures to the Australian Securities Exchange on behalf of four of the five banks, and then the fifth has given evidence to the Senate. If there was any grey area, it is gone. The Treasurer should just come to the dispatch box and admit the black hole.

There is another matter that the Treasurer should be honest about as well. This is the matter of the levy, or the tax, being borne by consumers. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have been out there beating their chests, being 'Mr Tough Guy' and saying that it would not be passed onto consumers, that they would be very angry with the banks if they attempted to pass it on to the consumers and that the ACCC was empowered to deal with it. It just would have been simpler, as the Leader of the Opposition and I, and the entire opposition team, have pointed out, if the Treasurer was honest about this.

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