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

I thank the member for Bonner for her question. The government’s budget has been pushed into deficit by the global financial crisis. As a result of that, the government has adopted a number of rules with respect to committing to get the budget back into surplus. One of them is to match new spending with savings. Those who care to look at the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook papers at the end of last year will see that that is precisely what has occurred. Unfortunately, there are some in this House who think the government is not doing enough and that the fiscal settings should be stricter. Sadly, their actions are very different from their words, because at the same time as they are indicating that the government should be tougher and should have more savings, over in the Senate they are blocking major savings legislation, defending millionaires’ private health insurance subsidies at a cost of $9.5 billion to the budget, and they are announcing new spending initiatives. The other day they announced $750 million a year to help save the Murray-Darling Basin, and yesterday they announced a new spending initiative with respect to climate change: $3.2 billion over the forward estimates with no savings whatsoever—no explanation as to where the money is coming from to pay for this policy.

The policy they announced was straight out of the John Howard songbook: pretend you are doing something, splash a lot of taxpayers’ money around, set up a big pork barrel slush fund for the National Party, and make sure you do not upset anybody by declaring business as usual. There are a couple of critical questions about this. How is it that the half the Liberal Party who think that climate change is either a scientific fraud or a communist conspiracy are prepared to support spending $3.2 billion to address it? And how is it that the other half of the Liberal Party, who voted for the government’s emissions trading legislation to be supported, now say that it should not be supported? The most significant question about this commitment is: how is it that the nations of the world gathered in Copenhagen only weeks ago to consider how to deal with climate change, and they were unable to come up with this brilliant solution that the Leader of the Opposition has somehow stumbled upon? They did not realise that if you commit to spending a quarter of a percentage point of the government’s budget over a few years it will fix climate change—Dr Abbott’s miracle cure for climate change. There it is in a little bottle; it is just a little bit of dirt, a few trees and a few solar panels. Mix them all together and you have got Dr Abbott’s miracle cure for climate change. Can we perhaps expect that we will have delegations descending upon Australia from all around the world to see the magical miracle cure for climate change from Dr Abbott? Both the Leader of the Opposition and I are probably waiting for his hair restorer product to come out, and there will be a few other customers around the House today.

Last night, my fourth opposition number, Senator Barnaby Goose or whatever his name is, let the cat out of the bag about where the money is coming from.

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