Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The reference that Senator Wong keeps making inaccurately to a supposed $70 billion black hole in the coalition costings is completely wrong. There is, dare I say it, a dishonest use of a figure out of context by the Labor Party which I will now explain. What the Labor Party does is accumulate all of the revenue estimates from its various new taxes and then assumes that, when you get rid of the tax, you press ahead with all of the related spending. We have found out in recent times that the Labor Party is the only party in Australia that can come up with a new tax which actually leaves the budget worse off, because the spending attached to the various Labor Party taxes is higher than the revenue it will generate. The carbon tax package leaves the budget worse off to the tune of $4.3 billion according to the government figures themselves. The mining tax package, in our view, leaves the budget worse off—