Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make it very clear to the chamber that the rules for the disclosure of election policy costings will remain the same. In fact, the joint select committee on which Senator Joyce served and of which Mr Pyne was deputy chair unanimously reco­mmended that:

Apart from the conditions for who can make a request for costings, the caretaker period costings service of the PBO is to be consistent with that of the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998.

This makes perfect sense. As Treasurer Costello said when he introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty:

By requiring the costings to be to made publicly available, there is limited scope for the results of the costings to be misrepresented.

Unfortunately, whilst the government agrees with the joint select committee and whilst the government agrees with former Treasurer Costello, the coalition no longer does. The coalition, the party that introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty, has now become the party of budget dishonesty. That is their position when it comes to the Parliamentary Budget Office. What a fall from fiscal grace. This is the party that used to have Mr Costello and Senator Minchin—people who were serious about the balancing the budget. Now they have Mr Hockey and Mr Robb, led by Mr Abbott, who have a 100 per cent failure rate when it comes to election policy costings, who are not in government today in great part because they got their election policy costings wrong and who now have a $70 billion black hole that they do not know what to do with. So they want to walk away from the Charter of Budget Honesty because they want to hide from the Australian people the extent of their budget black hole. They are the party of budget dishonesty. (Time expired)