Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy President—you are not acting anymore; you are the real thing! It is an interesting day. They have got the big guns out today defending Senator Wong. I would have to say that Minister Wong had a very bad day in the office today. Today was a shocker for Minister Wong. Let's start with her actual statement, which was:

Any funds raised from the sale of nonfinancial assets will be kept by the Future Fund—not by the government.

She said:

The government is not making withdrawals from the Future Fund. The Future Fund is simply making a small change to the types of assets it holds.

See, $250 million—a quarter of a billion dollars—is just small change. Hell, if you dropped it at the pub on a Friday night you would not bother picking it up!

Let us go through statement No. 9 of the budget financial statements. This is helping the finance minister out with finance. It has been ticked off; it is part of her portfolio. There we see it: net cash flows from investments in nonfinancial assets are $3.77 billion. The trouble is that that actually becomes part of the bottom line, where they end up with a $3.498 billion surplus—the magical $3.5 billion surplus. In two pages, quod erat demonstrandum—QED—it is all worked out for you. It does actually affect the bottom line. If the minister had read two pages she would have made a more concise, articulate and correct statement than the one she actually made. But the fun did not stop there. It just kept going. In answer to a question from Senator Cormann, my good friend and colleague, Mr Tune said, 'The estimates for the sale of nonfinancial assets'—we have just been through that—'include the expected sale of assets from the Future Fund.' Boom, boom! Surely not. Senator Wong said it was not so. She came into the parliament today and said it. Then we had to quiz her. Maybe she just missed it. We should quiz her on a few of the fundamental facts that any decent financial officer should know—fundamental facts that should be at your fingertips, like, for instance, how much you have got in the Future Fund. The answer to this one was a clanger. She said, 'I think we have got more than $70 billion.' She could have said, 'I think we've got more than a dollar,' or 'I think we've got more than $38.56.' But, no, she thinks we have more than $70 billion. It is just a little bit more, actually—it is $75.15 billion, if my memory serves me correctly. But who cares? What is $5 billion between friends these days? These are the most fundamental things that she cannot handle.

It gets worse. We asked how much they have contributed—not the capitalisation of interest but how much of a contribution to the Future Fund this economic luminary and her forebears have presided over. Her answer? She will take that one on notice. She did not know how much she had contributed to her own Future Fund. We were having a bit of a laugh before because they were saying two was the number. What is so interesting about the answer to this is that it is not a number. It is not a number because it is nought—it is zero. It is ex nihilo—it is nothing. They have contributed nothing to the Future Fund. But she could not remember that she had not contributed anything, so she took it on notice. No doubt we will get an answer back later on telling us it is nothing.

Where does this leave our nation? It leaves our nation in the hands of people who are completely and utterly out of their depth. If it was any sadder you would cry. This is the person who is responsible for financial affairs—she is the finance minister. But they do not have a clue. So they run out of the chamber and put Senator Bilyk out there to defend them after questions on notice. I would have stayed in the chamber myself.

To help out Minister Wong with a few of the figures: the government has $133 billion of liabilities to public servants. If they all retired and they all wanted their money the government would have to pay out $133 billion. But it does not have $133 billion. It has the Future Fund with $75 billion in it but if you start using that money to pay off your surplus then you are using their savings to fix up your stuff-up.