Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

The spectre of the Treasurer emerging from a cake is a rather extraordinary one to present, and I do not expect him to be doing that. I think the question was about budget surpluses, and I think it reveals—with great respect to Senator Allison—that she actually has no idea about government finances. Money that is not spent is a surplus. If it is spent, it is not a surplus. She seems to think that the $10 billion is there to be spent. No, it is not; that is the difference between the revenue and the expenditures. We spend some $235 billion; we have revenues of some $245 billion. The different is $10 billion; that is the surplus.

Under the Labor Party, what used to happen to those surpluses was they would all go off to the banks to pay for the borrowings. That is what used to happen with the Labor Party with any surplus, although they did not generate surpluses. But what we have had to do for the last eight years or so is devote those surpluses—that is, the difference between our revenues and our expenditures—to pay off Labor’s debt. Every single dollar of those surpluses went to reducing those debts, on which interest was payable. Now we are in the very fortunate and almost unique position in the Western world of having no debt to pay off—through you, Mr President, to Senator Allison. That means that the surpluses are there for investment in the future. That is why, once we had eliminated net debt, we were able, historically and uniquely, to establish the Future Fund into which surpluses could be deposited in order to meet the federal government’s one remaining liability, and that is the unfunded super liability which no previous federal government in the history of this country has ever funded.

The states, to their credit, now all do fund their superannuation liabilities, and I note, for the benefit of the opposition, that they quite strictly prevent any government putting their hands into the cookie jar to get hold of that superannuation money—unlike this opposition, which is going to raid the Future Fund. We are depositing surpluses into that Future Fund. We also announced that, because of the strength of the economy and the strength of the surpluses going forward, we will be able to establish, alongside the Future Fund, a Higher Education Endowment Fund into which we can deposit $5 billion to be preserved and protected from the ravages of those opposite, to be there in perpetuity, and the earnings of which will be available for universities into the future. That is what we will do with surpluses.