Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Edwards for that question. Indeed I can. Deloitte Access Economics has released the Budget monitor today, and it makes very sobering reading. It makes the obvious point that there are two key drivers to any budget—the economy and the decisions of politicians—and, when you read through the report, you see that by politicians they do not just mean those of us in government; they actually mean all of us here in the Senate, for example. We are all in this together. Back in September last year we inherited a situation with a weakening economy, rising unemployment, low consumer confidence, business investment which had plateaued and, of course, a budget position that was rapidly deteriorating. Back in December last year we adjusted our revenue forecast. The Labor Party was arguing that we adjusted them by too much, that we were intentionally taking a too-pessimistic outlook in order to make the numbers look worse. What we of course now know is that, despite our attempt to come up with a more realistic assessment of where revenue was likely to track, commodity prices have fallen much more sharply than was predicted at the time.

The sobering assessment in this report is that, sadly, good politics has good policy well and truly over a barrel. When they talk about good politics, what they are talking about here in this report is good politics from the irresponsible and reckless attitude of the Labor Party and the Greens. Today we had Mr Shorten out there again saying that all we need to do to fix our budget challenges is to increase taxes on multinationals, while here in the Senate the Labor Party and the Greens are voting to keep in place for research and development a tax subsidy for multinational companies which the Labor Party themselves said they wanted to scrap when they were in government. We have a situation where the Labor Party and the Greens are working together— (Time expired)