Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry that the Treasurer has not deemed it fit to debate the economy in this place. We warned that this would happen; we have been saying it for months and years. When the government brought forward the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook to October, for only the third time in the history of MYEFO, we smelt a rat. The two previous occasions on which MYEFO has been released in October, barely five months into the financial year, were with the announcement of an election pending in November. Those were the only two times. And noting that MYEFO is a document produced by the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance, rather than the Treasury and the Department of Finance, we were highly sceptical and we were understandably cautious. MYEFO has been released in November on seven occasions, five times in December and only twice previously in October—and now they bring it forward.

And then we worked it out. Oh, what a coincidence! We discovered that the mining tax receipts were going to be lodged with the Australian Taxation Office, on the other side of Canberra, at exactly the same time as the government was publishing this document. What a coincidence! Get out of here! How did that happen? The government said it had revised the mining tax number from $3 billion down to $2 billion. Old Swannie knew the questions were coming but he still did not get the numbers right. But we will let him off the hook for a brief moment because there are much bigger fish to put on our hook.

The government said it was going to get to a surplus of $1.1 billion. How? By fiddling the books. Labor is great at fiddling the books. The Health Services Union was good at fiddling the books. Charges have been laid against a former president of the Labor Party, suggesting that there may have been some fiddling of the books. And now we have got the Treasurer of the Labor Party fiddling the books. He is doing that by moving money between years—that is the time honoured trick. Of course, if you are a director of an Australian company you would probably go to jail for that. But, never mind, he is the Treasurer of Australia. Then he brings $2 billion of the Future Fund into the budget to deliver him over $417 million this financial year. And then he goes and raids the superannuation accounts of everyday Australians to get another $500 million. He does a fiddle here and a fiddle there and, hocus-pocus, we have got 'a promised surplus'. It is now 'a plan to have a surplus', according to the Prime Minister. It was 'a 'commitment, it was 'a promise' and it was 'a guarantee'. And then we had a little charade with the government saying it was 'a determination'. 'Maybe we'll get there; we hope to get there; goodness knows, we might get there; no, we're going to get there.'

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