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

It is interesting, Senator Cormann: I think I listened to Senator Boyce in silence but you cannot help yourself, can you?

We on this side happen to believe that the establishment of a Parliamentary Budget Office is very significant and very important, and there was a time when the opposition thought so too. Mr Pyne and Senator Joyce signed up to the report, signed up to the recommendation, and said, 'Yes, we're in.' Now what are they doing? They are crab-walking away from their commitment.

The legislation before the chamber is important legislation. It is a permanent reform. It will build on Australia's already very strong fiscal frameworks. It will ensure greater accountability and transparency in policy-making. It will promote greater understanding in the community about fiscal policy and, importantly and relevantly, it will ensure that the Australian public are kept better informed about the fiscal impact of policy proposals, particularly during the election period.

These reforms will allow all parliamentary parties and Independent members to have their policy costed by the PBO. Confidential policy costings are possible. The opposition keep suggesting they are not possible. They are. Not in a caretaker period but outside the caretaker period of a general election, members and senators will be able to request confidential policy costings. They will be able to test policies, they will be able to amend policies, they will be able to rework them, they will be able to develop different options—all of these things will be available to the opposition, all costed confidentially by the PBO outside the election period. But Mr Hockey is either too lazy or too incompetent to understand that and so now has a fig leaf around no confidentiality and the need for transparency during the caretaker period, a position advocated by Mr Peter Costello—they are Peter Costello's caretaker conventions of the Charter of Budget Honesty. Now Mr Hockey is saying, 'Oh no, we do not want that.' Inconvenient, this budget honesty thing, is it not? It is inconvenient, this budget transparency thing—inconvenient to actually have to front up to the Australian people and tell them what your policies cost.

During general elections, as I have said, the election policy costing service will be fully transparent, with costings made available to the public. This is exactly as proposed by Peter Costello when he introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty Act in 1998. I note that there are no interjections now.