Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

Hear, hear to you! But at least this proposal—$250,000 for a carriage; gold, gilt and all the rest of it—did go to cabinet. It was sent to the department of finance for a rigorous costing. We do not complain about the process in this case, but a $10 billion water package did not even make it to cabinet. By the time it got to the department of finance, the finance officials—you could see on their faces that they were appalled—were expected to cost a $10 billion water package, detailed on one page, in less than three days, in just over 2½ days. Of course, they could not do that; all they could do was give it a cursory glance—a $10 billion program of expenditure!

This is the latest major example of the Prime Minister cobbling together policy at the last minute and not subjecting it to the appropriate processes, the government’s own processes laid down in its Cabinet Handbook and in the Charter of Budget Honesty. This is not small change. We then had the incredible explanation. I think the minister for finance attempted to explain it today. He was attempting irony at estimates when he somewhat frivolously said, ‘It’s only a billion dollars a year.’ He was trying to be ironic, but these are substantial amounts of public money. Minister Minchin, who is supposed to be the key guardian holding the government internally to accountability on expenditures, just said: ‘Oh, well, it’s small change. What’s a billion dollars here or a billion dollars there? It doesn’t really matter. The Prime Minister can do what he likes.’ So you had the Prime Minister, on the one hand, cobbling together policies without proper costing and proper consideration and you had the minister for finance failing to hold him accountable, as he is required to do internally within the government.

This is not the only example of where this has happened in recent times. As I said, it is particularly becoming the case in the lead-up to elections. We had the announcement of what is known as the mature age worker tax offset during the last election campaign—another billion-dollar giveaway by the Prime Minister, Mr Howard. When he announced this program, the cost of it was just over $1 billion. What happened after the election was that, before this policy was implemented, the government had it recosted. The cost blew out to $1.4 billion, so before it is even implemented there is a $400 billion blow-out in another cobbled-together election promise by the Prime Minister—