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

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am happy to take up the whole half-hour if the member continues with this. I make the point that it is the Rudd government’s new spending initiatives of $10 million an hour from the Prime Minister who claimed before the election that he was a fiscal conservative. There are $124 billion new and additional spending initiatives since the election of the Rudd government. The Treasurer is fond of saying that we have had a massive collapse in revenue. It is true; there has been a significant collapse in revenue. But if you look at the estimated net debt of $188 billion, $124 billion of new spending makes up a big chunk of it. Of course there have been revenue falls. Even in this budget for the current financial year there would be a very small deficit as a result of the estimated revenue collapse. What has made the hole so deep is the level of expenditure by the Rudd government.

They will claim that they have created jobs. They had heroic assumptions about the first cash splash; they said it would create, from memory, 77,000 jobs. Where do they get these numbers? It is like the Treasurer saying that he has been advised that without that cash splash there would not have been such a significant increase, or marginal increase as it turned out, in household expenditure in the national accounts yesterday. We are going to test those figures. Whenever the Treasurer says, ‘Treasury tells me,’ let me say that we want to know what the assumptions are. We want to know what the justification is for the assertion. Some people in the gallery will just take the assertion as fact, but we want to know what the assertion is based on. Did Treasury, in fact, claim that there was a 0.6 per cent contribution as a direct result of the cash splash before Christmas? I am sure that in the interests of transparency the Treasurer will release all of that information.

In relation to the budget itself, because you have to raise revenue, when we proposed a small increase in the cost of cigarettes to offset the proposed broken promise by the Rudd government on private health insurance, the Treasurer released estimates from Treasury—

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