Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Boyce; I will take that. I will have to write that to Minister Wong as well. How can anybody trust this duo—it is a bit like Laurel and Hardy—to actually run the economy of the country? They simply cannot. When we heard the minister, Penny Wong, talking just two days ago, just on Sunday—this is not a long time ago—about the estimates, about the costings for the RSPT and the MRRT, she said, 'We don't release 10-year costings.' Clearly, according to the RSPT and MRRT review of estimates document I have in my hand, they do release 10-year costings. It is black and white. How can they be so inept or misleading? How can they continue to tell untruths? I do not know which one it is but of any of them or all of them are completely unacceptable. How can the minister, Penny Wong, say, 'We don't release 10-year costings?' If she did not know that only 12 months ago this document was released to the public then that is an absolute failing in her duty as a minister.

It gets even better, because when we look at the figures—and there is a $60 billion shortfall once we move from the absolute shambles of the RSPT to the MRRT that the minister did with only three companies, mind you—if the Treasury had actually used the same commodity price modelling for the MRRT as they had for the RSPT, it would have been a shortfall of $100 billion. This is what we are stuck with; this is what we have got: the inept nature of this government, the Treasury team on the other side of Minister Wayne Swan and Minister Penny Wong. It is just extraordinary. There is no way they can explain the fact that they made those comments when that document was available. It was either completely inept or they actually were misleading the Australian people, and the Treasurer and Minister Penny Wong should come out and explain to the Australian people why they told those untruths and if they were in fact misleading, because to the Australian people that is entirely unacceptable.