Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

When I was last speaking, I was making the point that the real intent of the government bringing in their version of a parliamentary budget office is to enable them to again repeat the false undermining of the budget costings that we took to the last election. We took the view prior to the last election that we would not submit our costings to Treasury because of the bias in Treasury. We had them independently costed by reputable people and it was only after the election was held, and there was no winner, that the Independents demanded that costings be examined by Treasury and that they be briefed upon them. I had dealt with the fact that Treasury had disallowed $2.5 billion of our costings from the item of conservative bias allowance, quite inappropriately, and they had disallowed $3.3 billion against the three funds, where they had identified $4.6 billion, but they had, they said, a secret list of programs and that we should have identified individual programs for our savings to be valid. They disallowed $2.4 billion of savings that we identified that could be saved from the NBN, because Treasury said that they said that their estimate of the interest rate paid on the borrowings they would have to make was 4.9 per cent, whereas we said it would be 5.5 per cent, which gave us the right amount of savings. We had based that on the average of the bond rate over the six months prior to the election. Yesterday, I produced an average of the bond rate from July 2010 to date, which in fact showed that that bond rate is 5.23 per cent. So, once again, Treasury got it wrong and wrongly disallowed that saving for the benefit of the Independents.

There was a further $600,000 that they knocked out which were to be savings from our policies to get people off welfare benefits and into the workforce, which would allow tax to be paid by those people and savings to be made by welfare. Treasury said, 'No, you can't claim those because they come from a second-round incident,' yet they had allowed savings in the government's budget papers of a similar amount of money that were second-round benefits. Again, that was inappropriately disallowed. There was $1.15 billion disallowed by Treasury with regard to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme because, they said, of the identified 40 per cent of savings that could be identified from the arrangements first entered into by the present Leader of the Opposition when he was health minister and then by the government itself, they wanted to legislate for 23 per cent of those savings. So there was another 17 per cent to be booked by us. That is nearly $10 billion of the so-called $11 billion black hole. There was no black hole, and yet the politicisation of Treasury allowed this to become a statement that was made and the Independents said they partially—if not wholly—made their decision to go with the Gillard lot on the basis of what Treasury had to say to them.

This is the important point about this bill. We said we want to be independent of Treasury. We want to have access to Treasury modelling and Treasury estimates, but we do not want it to be tied to the coat-tails of Treasury, because that places any opposition in the position of simply having a biased Treasury that misleads people and disadvantages an opposition in a way which is, quite frankly, unconscionable. We have sensibly moved the amendments to make sure that we can have access to the right data and make sure that a parliamentary budget office has access to outside data, which would allow a true independent assessment to be made. But, with the poor old parliamentary secretary over there being silenced by the Leader of Government Business, he has again been placed in a position, as we said right at the beginning of the debate, of being a boy on a man's errand. He is quite a nice chap, but the problem is that he just does not have the wherewithal and it is not his— (Time expired)

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