Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I did not quite hear that. I thought you are saying, Senator Evans, that you are doing this deliberately to impact on me, on my birthday, I might say. But twice in one day an individual senator—forget who it is—is being prevented from talking in this chamber that we are elected to to look after the interests of our constituents, in my case the people of the state of Queensland.

I know that a lot of this $555 million in so-called 'lost' super, and I put that in inverted commas—I call it stolen money—comes from people who earned the money in my state of Queensland. Queensland is a growth state, a state where until the Labor government came along there was a lot of investment in mines into the future. There was a lot of work in Queensland based on mining and other industries, but the carbon tax and the mining tax that is about to come in are rapidly dissipating that will to invest in Queensland. But it has been there in the past. People have worked in Queensland, they have paid their super contributions and they have moved on to other jobs in different parts of the state, perhaps interstate or even overseas. They have this money left that it is owing to them.

So what is the Labor government going to do? They are going to steal it and put it into consolidated revenue so that this mythical $1.5 billion surplus might appear in the May budget. As Senator Williams so adroitly pointed out, whilst you will be up to fool people in the next budget you will not be able to do it about September next year when the government will be forced, as happened this year, to demonstrate just how shonky are their budget estimates. I am disappointed to say that in the way the Labor Party has cooked the books they do seem to be being assisted by Treasury. I do not like saying that but it is clear that these figures are so shonky and that this bill, along with a lot of the other measures, is just so shonky that it is a pity there are not more people in the Department of Treasury prepared to whistle-blow on the sorts of things that are happening.

This is just one indication of where this government will go to any lengths to try and get to this mythical surplus. You know, Madam Acting Deputy President, that they slashed our defence budget by something like $5.2 billion through the forward estimates to the lowest contribution as a percentage of GDP to defence of our country since 1938.

I could talk for a full 20 minutes but I am not even going to get the opportunity of having my 20 minutes, let alone others on my side who wanted to speak about this. I could go through time after time just listing where these shonky bills and the shonky way the budget has been put together by the Labor Party are just dishonest. It is a typical Labor Party approach. I repeat again the dishonesty of the Prime Minister in the carbon tax debate. We have heard these unanswered questions in relation to the AWU slush fund that the Prime Minister has also not been able or prepared to answer. And you can go through commitment after commitment, promise after promise, by the Labor Party and its leader and you will see that it is a dishonest government, a government shrouded in dishonesty. I will be joining my colleagues in supporting an amendment to this and if it does not go through I will be opposing the bill.