Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. I refer to the budget papers which state that taxpayers are now guaranteeing over $650 billion in bank deposits, $104 billion in bank wholesale funding and even $10 billion to the International Monetary Fund. Given that taxpayers are also now guaranteeing up to $150 billion in state and territory borrowing, $26 billion in Ruddbank debt, up to $43 billion in the National Broadband Network, as well as, we discover today, up to $60 billion in further infrastructure, I ask the Treasurer: will he confirm that Australian taxpayers now have over $1 trillion of risk on debt that did not exist at the time of the election of the Rudd government?

Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They make it up by the minute. The fact is that it does not make any sense at all to add up the contingent liabilities in the statement of risk—none whatsoever. No-one else in the world does. Nobody serious in the economic profession does and no-one serious in this House does. It just shows you how irresponsible those opposite have become; how desperate they have become. It is simply not valid to do that. Many of those that he quoted are remote and unquantifiable.