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

He joined the book club. It is a bit belated, but I welcome him to the club! In that book he proposed a specific initiative. I could not find any savings initiatives. I could not find any tough, rigorous decisions that would help to get the budget back into surplus. But what he did propose was that the means test on family tax benefits should be abolished and that people who have children under five should get assistance from the government for that, irrespective of their income. I am a bit conflicted on this proposition because I have a daughter who is three years old and I would be one of the people benefiting from the member for Warringah’s proposal. Unfortunately, in my role as Minister for Finance and Deregulation I have a different position, which is that this would be a grotesque waste of taxpayers’ money. Hardworking low- and middle-income earners paying the taxes for high-income earners like me to get a free kick is not my idea of good public policy.

I am waiting for some more books from some of the other would-be contenders on the Liberal Party benches. I am waiting for them, but they are not yet here. Maybe there will be one from the member for North Sydney, but he would probably struggle to get out of bed to write one; maybe from the member for Curtin, but she would have to find somebody else to do it for her; and possibly from the member for Goldstein, but he would struggle to find a publisher who thought his works were interesting. So I am not quite sure who is going to step up to the plate to assist the member for Warringah, but I do know one thing: there is a day of reckoning coming for the opposition, and the interesting thing is that it is a trap that they themselves set with things called the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook and the Charter of Budget Honesty, which they implemented in government and which are still in place. What that means is that when we get to an election campaign they have to stand up and say just how they are going to produce a lower deficit and a lower debt and make lots of nice election promises at the same time. We will be watching with great interest as that day of reckoning emerges. You can bet your life the rhetoric will dissolve into the sands faster than you can say boo, because that is what it is: just pure rhetoric.

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