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

I am pleased to be able to engage in debate with my fifth shadow finance minister in 2½ years. I am claiming an Australian record. I do not think there has been any previous instance of a senior portfolio having so many shadow ministers in one parliamentary term. In fact, a relatively representative group—three states, both genders, both houses and both parties in the coalition—has been represented. There was Senator Joyce and before him the member for North Sydney, the member for Dickson and Senator Coonan. Now there is the member for Goldstein, and he, like all his predecessors, is trotting out yet another dog-ate-my-homework smokescreen which is designed to pour out the rhetoric and to put forward some nice little slogans and a few grabs while avoiding one fundamental question: ‘What do the opposition propose to do with respect to government spending, taxation, the budget, fiscal policy and the future of the nation should it be elected in the election that is due within a matter of months?’ Eventually, they will be forced to reveal their plans and to give the Australian people some indication of what they are proposing to do. Maybe it will be this evening. We will find out in due course. But thus far all we have had has been rhetoric and empty slogans.

On the matter of shadow finance ministers, the member for Goldstein’s immediate predecessor must be feeling rather miffed today. He lost the portfolio because he tended to get a bit confused with figures, but one of his predecessors—the member for Sydney—got promoted to shadow Treasurer, and yesterday the member for North Sydney managed to say that 12 minus 9.8 equals 3.2. So while Senator Joyce got very big figures—billions and trillions—confused, the new shadow Treasurer cannot even work out what 9.8 taken from 12 equals. It was not a slip of the tongue; he was reading his own question. We all make slips of the tongue occasionally, but a shadow Treasurer’s reading out his own question and being unable to make a simple subtraction does give you cause to ponder the prospects for the nation and for fiscal management should he actually become Treasurer.

Given the record of the coalition in government on the issues that are the ostensible subject matter of this MPI debate, perhaps we should not be surprised that they cannot find a shadow finance minister who can stay in the portfolio longer than a matter of months. We remember—as the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government pointed out today—the infamous Regional Partnerships program, the Beaudesert rail project where no trains ever ran, the cheese factory that got money after it closed down, the ethanol factory that never existed and so the list goes on. We remember the government advertising spending in the 2007 calendar year of $254 million. For the purposes of comparison, what has the Rudd government’s record been? We spent $86 million in 2008 and $115 million in 2009.

I note that as a central part of his attack the member for Goldstein made a claim about spending on consultants, so let us have a look at the record of spending on consultants. In the last full financial year of the Howard government, total spending on consultants was $535 million, in 2007-08 it was $454 million and in 2008-09 it was $475 million. It was $60 million lower in the first full year of the Rudd government than in the last full year of the Howard government not accounting for inflation, because by definition the fees of consultants, like the rest of the economy, would have been a little bit more expensive given the two years that had passed in that time.

We all recall the famous water plan drawn up on the back of a serviette after a long lunch by the former Prime Minister, Mr Howard, and how, when my predecessor as finance minister, Senator Minchin, was asked on the Meet the Press program a couple of days after it was announced, ‘Was this costed by the department of finance?’ he said that it would be ‘costed in due course’. The normal pattern with these things is that the department of finance costs significant government spending proposals before they are decided and before they are announced, not after they are announced unilaterally by the Prime Minister without consulting his Department of the Treasury or department of finance.

We all remember the record of the coalition on discretionary grants, which blew out from $450 million in 2002 to $4.5 billion in 2007. So within about five or six years, the Howard government went from spending $450 million to spending $4.5 billion on discretionary grants. You would be interested to know that the record of the Rudd government on this point, Madam Deputy Speaker, is that in the following year the amount spent on discretionary grants by this government fell 27 per cent from the figure that we inherited from the Howard government.

We all remember the blow-out in the number of public servants under the Howard government. From around 2002 until 2007, the total numbers went from 212,000 to 247,000. In the three years covered by the relevant budgets of the Rudd government since it has been in office, the total increase in the Public Service will be about three per cent—that is, roughly one per cent a year—which is lower than the population increase in Australia over that period, while in the last three years of the Howard government, Public Service numbers increased by 9.3 per cent. So the members of the opposition do not come to this debate with a great deal of recent credibility.

I now turn to the government’s record on issues of efficiency, accountability and spending generally. First, on coming to office we imposed a one-off, two per cent efficiency dividend across virtually all of government. There were one or two exceptions; much of defence operational activity was one of them. That one-off, two per cent efficiency dividend meant that the ordinary operating costs of government shrank significantly as a result and that squeezed better performance and better productivity out of the public sector.

We have put forward a dramatic change in the structure of procurement in the processes of government, working through product category by product category and delivering very substantial savings. There are half a billion dollars worth of savings already projected from IT courtesy of the Gershon inquiry and significant savings from coordinated approaches to property procurement, telecommunications, Microsoft product, office machines and most recently—this was announced just prior to the budget and included in the budget—$160 million over four years through coordinating approaches to the purchase of aviation and travel services. These are all things that the Howard government could have and should have done but refused to do because of its obsession with mimicking the private sector.

We have been in the process, which will peak in the parliament in the next sitting week, of reforming the structure of administration of government superannuation. This will not only deliver significant benefits as to the costs of government—enabling us to modernise the IT systems used in administering government superannuation that desperately need reinvestment on a cost-neutral basis—but also deliver very substantial improvements in the outcomes for the investment component of the superannuation that applies to both public servants and military personnel in the relevant schemes.

We have put in place very substantial reforms to the management of discretionary grants and accountability for dealing with discretionary grants so that never again will we see some of the absolute administrative outrages that characterised the infamous Regional Partnerships program. We have put in place strict guidelines with respect to political advertising to ensure that all substantial advertising proposals—any things that cost above $250,000—have to go through an arms-length process of scrutiny that determines whether or not they are genuine government advertising or political advertising.

See this speech in context