George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

No, it is not our choice, Senator Lundy. It is not our choice to give the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee insufficient work to do and to overburden and therefore to use the time of the economics committee so that the time for consideration of all of these economic agencies is foreshortened. I like you, Senator Lundy. You are a very good person, but you are not a very frequent participant in the Senate economics estimates committee. If you were, you would know that under the particularly expert scrutiny of Senator Mathias Cormann and Senator David Bushy, if I may single out two colleagues, the forensic examination of this govern­ment's policy and its policy failures through the examination of bureaucrats—or, I should say, senior public servants—in the macro­economic group has taken hours. These are not hours wasted but hours of fruitful inquiry. These have revealed, among other things, the scandal of the minerals resource rent tax where the assumptions, as it was revealed the year before last in the economics committee, did not stack up.

The modelling on which the forecasts were based was revealed to be wholly inade­quate, and the same or similar revelations were made about the carbon tax. The capaci­ty for the economics estimates committee to scrutinise at length in a forensic way the detail of economic policy and the assumpt­ions underlying that economic policy will be denied to it next week—and this at a time when the Prime Minister says she wants the economy to be front and centre.

The Senate estimates committees next week, if you add up all the different portfolios across the different estimates committees, will go for roughly 80 hours. Do you know how much time in that 80 hours, as a result of the motion Senator Arbib brought before the chamber, will be allowed for the examination of taxation and revenue?