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

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will turn to the most recent example, which is the opposition’s response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Their proposal, which they could not quite sign up to as policy but which they wanted us to sign up to as policy, would involve an additional hit of about $1.3 billion to the budget by the time we get to 2020 in order to buy a lot more international emissions permits than are permitted under the government’s scheme.

We have seen the opposition relentlessly block government savings initiatives in the Senate. We have seen them block the government’s alcopops initiatives for months. We have seen them block reform of Commonwealth dental services which would ensure that dental services are delivered to the people most in need. Most recently we have seen them block the government’s reforms to the private health insurance rebate, which will deliver huge amounts of savings to the budget in the longer term.

They are doing all of these things while at the same time posturing about how, if they were in government, they would have a much lower deficit and much lower debt. This is all at the same time as not announcing one single savings initiative—none. In opposition, we announced savings initiatives, sometimes ones that attracted political controversy. There has not been one savings initiative. The only proposal they have advanced that could be categorised in this way is a tax hike on cigarettes. In order to ensure that the Leader of the Opposition and other wealthy Australians can still get subsidised private health insurance, they want to increase the price of cigarettes.

That is the Liberal Party’s track record. Here they come today criticising the government for alleged wasteful spending. Their track record in opposition is one that simply cannot stack up against their rhetoric about what the government is doing. In government they set global records for waste and misuse of taxpayers’ money and global records for excessive spending. In opposition all they have consistently done is propose more spending, block government savings measures and, indeed, fail to deliver any savings options themselves.

I will turn now to the government’s record, because that has been impugned in the MPI proposal today. The government’s record is this: first, in the budget last year, a total of $33 billion of savings over four years, and $7.3 billion in the 2008-09 year. The bulk of that was in spending cuts—$5.4 billion in cuts to spending. In this year’s budget, the savings for the four years were slightly lower at $22 billion, but there were many substantial, tough decisions that will deliver much larger savings once we get to the five- to 10-year period, because the savings steadily increase over time. A number of those savings decisions were hard decisions that will inevitably attract and have already attracted significant political controversy and complaint. I mention these just as examples to indicate how important it is and how much priority the government places on getting the budget back into surplus. Reforming the private health insurance rebate, reforming indexation of the family tax benefit structure, freezing the top end family tax benefits indexation arrangements in order to—

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