Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Deakin for his question. The budget last night delivered in full on the Prime Minister’s January commitments to macroeconomic management. It delivered a surplus of 1.8 per cent of GDP—$21.7 billion—over 1.5 per cent of which was not reliant upon a minor revenue surge; $3.8 billion in spending cuts, on top of the $1.6 billion in spending cuts that were projected prior to the election during the campaign; and $1.9 billion in revenue measures, totalling savings of approximately $7.3 billion. Government spending growth has gone from about five per cent in real terms in the financial year that is about to end to one per cent in real terms, a significant contraction of fiscal policy in order to assist the Reserve Bank and to put downward pressure on inflation and interest rates.

Honourable members may have noticed that Budget Paper No. 2 this year—which, of course, is the statement of all the measures in the budget—is a little bit thicker than it usually is. It is actually quite a bit longer than it usually is. In fact, it is 104 pages longer than last year’s Budget Paper No. 2. There is a simple explanation for that, and that is that there are 106 pages of savings measures in the budget in Budget Paper No. 2. The reason why the two figures are almost exactly the same is that there were virtually no savings measures at all in the 2007 budget—and, in fact, in the last four budgets there were virtually no savings measures at all.

The government has done the hard yards not done by the previous government. But, inevitably, some commentators say that we should have done more. To be fair, some of those people have been consistent in this message over a number of years. But imagine my surprise last night when, casually watching The 7.30 Report, I saw that they had been joined belatedly by the member for Wentworth, who described this budget as ‘a high-taxing, high-spending budget’. As I was watching this I asked myself, ‘Is this the same member for Wentworth who, on Meet the Press only 10 days earlier, said that there was no need to cut government spending, that inflation is not a problem and that inflation is merely a fairytale?’ Somehow, within the space of 10 days, the member for Wentworth has moved seamlessly and shamelessly from saying, ‘Don’t do anything,’ to saying, ‘You haven’t done anything.’ Somehow or other, he has slipped from one to the other with nothing in between. This, of course, is a great mystery to me. I have racked my brains for an explanation for this blatant contradiction. The only explanation I have been able to come up with is that somehow the member for Wentworth has managed to clone himself and that there are actually two Malcolm Turnbulls out there. He has managed to clone himself—and there is no truth in the rumour that he used his ego as the stem cell either, by the way.

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