Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't it great that those opposite can continue to talk about the last term of government as though the Global Financial Crisis never happened? They will be proud that Peter Costello could deal with an Asian financial crisis but refuse to acknowledge that Wayne Swan could deal with a Global Financial Crisis yet they come in here and say, 'Oh no, how on earth is Joe Hockey meant to be able to deal with a change in the iron ore price?' That is the argument that they come into this chamber with.

The same Treasurer was holding a document which reportedly involved a $200-million cut to New South Wales in GST and refused to release it until after people vote. It is not the first time we have seen examples from this government of refusing to release a document until after people vote. When they had the Commission of Audit report, they made sure that that was not released before people voted in the WA election. Before the federal election, they made sure, before people voted, that they had not released their policies. This is the first government we have ever had that has turned out to release its election policies eight months after the election when they got to the budget. But in doing so, when they have had to reconcile with the broken promises of what the Prime Minister said before the election, they have come up with a new strategy.

The strategy that has been adopted here, no government has ever been brazen enough to adopt. When a broken promise has occurred, sometimes politicians say there was a context or there is a changed circumstance. Never before has Australia had a Prime Minister who thought the strategy was to say, 'No, I did not say it. It never happened.' People talk about this being a Prime Minister from the 1950s. That cannot be true because there was television in the 1950s. This Prime Minister works on the basis that, if he just says he never said it, there will be no record, no-one will know. This is a bit of a problem when people have watched the Prime Minister saying on television that a GDP to debt ratio of about 50 to 60 per cent is 'a pretty good result'. When he is asked a most basic question—when the Leader of the Opposition reads from a transcript and says, 'Prime Minister, did you say these words?'—the Prime Minister cannot answer yes, he cannot answer his own words. There is a debate going on at the moment in Australian politics: on one side are the words of the Prime Minister of Australia and on the other side are the words of the Prime Minister of Australia—and they are both losing in this debate! But it is not the only time the Prime Minister has done it. The government's entire economic narrative is based on a fundamental lie: they argue that they are somehow fixing debt and deficit. Since when was doubling the deficit a way of fixing it? But that is exactly what they did within a few months of coming to office. Having done so, as has been reported in TheAustralian Financial Review, they have since blown out the deficit by a further $80 billion and blown out the debt by $200 billion.

See this speech in context