Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Treasurer. Would the Treasurer inform the House when the next Intergenerational report will be released? Has the Treasurer seen comments regarding the importance of the independence of the Future Fund from political interference?

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Deakin for his question. Under the Charter of Budget Honesty Act the government is required to produce an intergenerational report every five years to benchmark the intergenerational equity and the way in which our country is preparing for the great challenge of the ageing of the population. The first report was released in 2002 and the next one, the five-yearly update, will be released next week.

We have made some progress since the first Intergenerational report was released, particularly in the area of retiring Labor debt and establishing the Future Fund to meet unfunded superannuation liabilities. The OECD, in its annual survey of Australia, lauded the establishment of the Future Fund, saying:

The Australian government has established the “Future Fund” to build up assets to pay for future pension liabilities ... The Future Fund is explicitly quarantined from other possible medium-term objectives. This is laudable, especially in the light of cross-country evidence which shows that attempts to pre-fund public pension liabilities by accumulation in social security systems have, without a high degree of explicit separation, often been thwarted by increases in general government expenditure.

So the OECD was saying that it is very important to quarantine the funding of future liabilities from other spending, because other spending can completely undermine the objective that you have in funding those pension liabilities. It is making the point that if you set up one of these funds, the moment you start raiding it for other expenditures is the moment you undermine the whole improvement that it is designed to have.

I was very interested to see more support for the independence of the Future Fund in today’s Australian at page 23, in an article by Joseph Kerr under the headline ‘Tanner promises to run a tighter ship’. Mr Tanner made lots of promises in this article, but get a load of this one. This is what the Australian records this morning:

The Future Fund needed to be more independent of government, as the governance arrangements currently allowed for too much government interference.

So here is a party that has announced it is going to—

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Tanner interjecting

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They asked the question a week ago, he said. What, they asked the question before you decided on the raid? Was that the point? So, a week ago—he said they asked the question a week ago—the Future Fund had to be more independent, but that was a couple of days before he decided on a $2.7 billion raid.

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Wrong again, Pete.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Melbourne has been warned!

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here is a political party that has decided for political reasons to raid the Future Fund for $2.7 billion whilst it is demanding that governments not be allowed to engage in political interference. Here is the safecracker demanding that banks up their security. He is out there raiding the Future Fund and demanding that it not be allowed to be raided by people like him. He was right a week ago—he was absolutely right a week ago—and he is wrong now. Let me make the point: the first burglary is the hard one. Once you have done it once, you can do it twice; you can do it three times; you can do it four times.

The other thing that Mr Tanner promised in this article is that he is going to run a tighter ship than Peter Costello. The article says:

Labor wants business to believe a Rudd government would run a tighter ship than Peter Costello—

and the evidence for that is a $2.7 billion raid on the Future Fund. That is a much tighter ship! How about this for the tighter ship? The Gold Coast Weekend Bulletin records that Eddy Sarroff, a Gold Coast councillor, has been asked by opposition leader Kevin Rudd to be the Labor candidate in McPherson. Councillor Sarroff said he agreed to run on the Labor ticket only after Mr Rudd promised a $2 billion infrastructure upgrade for the Gold Coast. Two billion for one seat! They saw Eddy and they said to Eddy, ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ and Eddy said, ‘No thanks; I’ll be a double billionaire.’

We have Eddy Sarroff—$2 billion for the seat of the Gold Coast. We have Eric Ripper out there today. He says he has his own infrastructure promise from the Leader of the Opposition, for Western Australia. We have the $2.7 billion raid on the Future Fund. And all of this is designed to show that Labor can run a tighter ship than the coalition! If you would believe that, you would be like Eddy Sarroff. You would believe that there is $2 billion coming to buy his seat in the Gold Coast.

The member for Lilley sat down. He was just about to intervene, no doubt. I figure that 150 seats at $2 billion a pop is $300 billion that the Leader of the Opposition is out for, which of course is more than all of the Commonwealth revenue collected in one year. Let me say that this Leader of the Opposition gets played as a patsy. Any time someone wants money, they are down asking for it. He cannot say no. He cannot stand up to a state premier. He cannot even stand up to Eddy Sarroff.