Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

You were there somewhere, Senator Moore. I did not get to you. You were probably after dinner. You were not alone. There were many colleagues of yours vying for attention in this particular exercise. So where do we get this line from the Labor Party that there was too much spending and that we were uncontrolled spenders when we are also told by various members and senators rising in the ordinary course of their business in this place and the other place that we were not spending enough in government?

That confusion has continued to today. Only today, we were told by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Conroy, that the former Liberal government had ripped a billion dollars out of health. First of all, the claim is not true—we did not rip a billion dollars of health. But even if we had ripped a billion dollars out of health, wouldn’t that have been precisely what Mr Tanner was calling for in March of 2007 when he talked about the Howard government needing to be disciplined about unnecessary government spending? Perhaps we are misrepresenting the Labor Party. Let us be fair.