Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed! I appreciate the interjection by the member for Eden-Monaro. Without that timing trick, the return to surplus would be pushed back a year to 2020-21. This is coming at the very time the government is in confusion, inconsistency—that's being too kind; they are in complete abandonment of their fiscal rules.

Let's just remind the House what those fiscal rules say, from the 2018-19 budget:

The budget repair strategy is designed to deliver sustainable budget surpluses building to at least 1 per cent of GDP as soon as possible, consistent with the medium-term fiscal strategy.

A little back, before the 2013 election, we were promised surpluses in the first year and every year after that, but that's this year's fiscal strategy.

The strategy sets out that:

As recently as 26 September, the finance minister told Sky News:

No. I do not know where all this speculation comes from. The rule remains precisely the same.

But then the Prime Minister began to crab-walk away, saying, 'There are exceptions to the rules.' He said, somewhat confusingly:

The government reserves the right to exercise that discretion, but they are the rules.

The finance minister then went a little bit further:

Actually, the offset rule in our fiscal strategy in our budget requires that any new spending measures have to be more than offset with spending reductions in other parts of the budget.

What we are talking about here is a tax cut.

As my colleague the shadow Treasurer told the House yesterday, apparently the fiscal rules are now that tax cuts don't need an offset; only spending measures need an offset. The problem is, then, if you're not going to offset them, how are you going to pay for them? So you're spending the revenue upgrade, which is effectively a breach of the fiscal rules. No matter how you cut it, the Liberal Party is planning to breach its fiscal rules by not offsetting tax cuts, by effectively not having a way to pay for the tax cuts, by breaching its own fiscal rule, which says that improvements to the economy, to the extent that they improve the budget bottom line, should be banked rather than spent.

So then Australians are entitled to say, 'What will be the long-term effect of this?' Is it to be an increase in debt already in excess of $20,000 per person, in gross terms, in excess of $14,000 per person in net terms? A Liberal Party that once drove debt trucks around the country should now be driving debt road trains around the country.

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