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

I am going to tell you, Senator Thorp. Senator Thorp over there from the Labor Party brains trust thinks that whether the budget is in surplus or in deficit is a matter of complete irrelevance. I am going to tell you, Senator Thorp. Ms Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister, came out with a Cheshire cat smile because she knew that, whatever the hit to the revenue, she had got past a political difficulty for herself. She had got past a short-term political difficulty for the government. Mr Wayne Swan is a person of such intellectual depth that I suspect he had no idea what was going on. But the three people who I feel very certain had the biggest Cheshire cat smiles on their faces that night were the CEO of BHP Billiton, the CEO of Rio Tinto and the CEO of Xstrata, because they knew they had found negotiating partners who were, shall we say, a walk in the park.

So who is going to suffer from this? Who is going to sufferer from the hubris, the incompetence, the ignorance of the senior ministers who negotiated this mining tax? The bottom line of the budget is going to suffer. Senator Conroy said before in his answer, 'Well, if you want to see the effect of the mining tax collections, it is in the budget bottom line.' Senator Conroy, you are right. That is the one thing you got right: it sure is in the budget bottom line, because the budget has gone from a projected surplus to a projected deficit approaching $20 billion and heading south. So, for five years out of five, we will have, on your government’s watch, a deficit budget.

I do not want to be mean-spirited, but I have to say that I have never seen—and the Australian people have never seen—a more fiscally, economically incompetent bunch of ministers than the ministers in the Rudd government and, most particularly, in the Gillard government. And there has been nobody more incompetent, nobody less equal to the task, than the Treasurer, Mr Wayne Swan—the genius who negotiated this brilliant mining tax!

If this government does go to electoral oblivion later this year—and that is by no means for sure; we go into this election as the underdog—it will be remembered as the only Australian government, in the memory of the oldest person living in Australia today, never, ever to have produced a budget surplus. That will be your legacy. That will be the badge you will wear from hereon, down the pages of Australian history for all the years and decades into the future. It was on your watch; you were the ministers who never, ever in the life of the oldest living Australian, managed to produce a budget surplus. Yet it was your Prime Minister who said, 'The capacity to manage the budget is the ultimate test of a government’s competence.'

Opposition members: Hear, hear!

An incident having occurred in the gallery—