Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What is it with this government and antipathy between prime ministers and treasurers? What is it? First we had the dysfunctional pairing of the member for Warringah and the hapless Joe Hockey. The member for Warringah was going to be the infrastructure Prime Minister, until the Treasurer slashed the project funding. There was the heartfelt promise on health, education and pensions: 'Nothing will change.' That was until the Treasurer got his hands on the budget and slashed the bottom out of it. Now we have got a wonderful new pairing of Prime Minister and Treasurer. We have got the member for Wentworth as Prime Minister and the member for Cook as Treasurer. How is that going? We had the Treasurer out the front for months on the GST—salesman of the year. He said, 'Joe couldn't sell anything. I can sell a GST.' Out he went. What happened to that? The Prime Minister cut his legs out from under him. COAG was cancelled because they could not get their act together.

Then we had the excesses of negative gearing that would be looked at, or so thought the Treasurer until the Prime Minister came in here last week and said, 'No, I didn't say that.' This diabolic duo is worse than the last! And do you know what else? The Australian public is onto it. I have constituents on my Facebook page saying, 'Jo, what are they going to do in this budget?' And all I can say is, 'Who knows? They don't.'