Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We had been waiting for days. Day after day turned into weeks. The opposition said, ‘The savings are coming; the savings are coming.’ There was leak after leak after leak about the disunity in the coalition about this matter and what it produced was the banishment of the shadow finance minister from the press conference yesterday. After we saw the results of what they produced, I am sure he was pleased not to have been there, because they shone a light on the incompetence of the shadow Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition when it comes to economics.

What we had was a rerun of the $10.6 billion costings con job that was presented to the Australian people at the last election campaign and declared fraudulent by the Department of Finance and Deregulation and the Treasury. We had a repeat of that. Of course, in the middle of all of that, the shadow Treasurer went to the Sydney Morning Herald and admitted that he only found out about the costings five minutes before they were presented. Could anybody imagine Peter Costello finding out what was in his budget five minutes before he delivered it? Well, that is what actually happened, according to the shadow Treasurer, with their election program in the lead-up to the last election. So we have bumbling incompetence.

Worse than the bumbling incompetence is the insensitivity—the lack of understanding not only about our national economic circumstances but about what has just happened in our country, particularly in Queensland, where it took the opposition days to even get there and to understand the importance of it. It took Mr Hockey himself days and days and days.

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