Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Finance, Competition Policy and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

Well, the Treasurer is a bloke who is out of his depth. The Treasurer is a bloke who is the laughing-stock at the moment of economists, of the press gallery, of his colleagues and ultimately of the Australian people. The difficulty and the most important point to make out of all of this—which I opened with—is that this is undermining confidence. This really is undermining confidence in the Australian economy. Talking it down, talking about the inflation genie getting out of the bottle—that is all very difficult.

The other aspect of the Labor Party plan at the moment is to slash government spending. The point I made before was that this government spends about $1 billion a day. This is a big, international economy, a $1.1 trillion economy, with a Treasurer who does not have the capacity to manage it. The other day there was an announcement from the Minister for Finance and Deregulation talking about some spending cuts of just over $600 million, which to the average Australian—to all of us—is an enormous amount of money. But the way in which the Labor Party couched this spending cut was that it was going to be part of bringing down pressure on inflation. It is not going to have any impact on reducing inflationary pressures in this country. That is why people from the Reserve Bank governor down are laughing at the contribution of this Treasurer at the moment. To suggest that, in a $1,100 billion per annum economy, this is going to bring down inflation—that it will put a downward pressure on inflation—really just goes to the laughing-stock demonstration that this guy is putting forward.

When the Labor Party talks about government spending under the Howard government, it is talking about spending in areas like family tax benefit, to help families. It is talking about areas like child care, where there was increased expenditure under the Howard government. It is talking about tax cuts. It is talking about all of these issues. There is no proposal on the table at the moment that I am aware of to trim billions of dollars from those measures. It is really quite amazing when you look at how shallow this argument is. Nothing has been more startling than the revelation by this Treasurer—to underscore his economic inability—when he said that the $31 billion of tax cuts were okay this year because they were a Labor Party election promise and they would not add to inflationary pressures, but tax cuts in the out years would not be allowed because they would be inflationary. That is how shallow and inept this Treasurer is. The Australian people at the moment are laughing at this bloke. (Time expired)

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