Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. I refer to his remarks in this House on 9 August 2007. He said:

It is traditional in the economic debate about the relationship between government spending and interest rates to focus on the quantity of government spending, the size of the surplus and the size of the deficit. That is vital; it is very important, but there is another dimension which is often overlooked—that is, the quality of government spending. What is that money being spent on? Quantity is obviously vital and the settings are vital but so too is the quality.

The question is this: does the minister stand by this statement and, if so, how does he reconcile it with his answer earlier today in which he made it clear that the $14 billion primary schools assembly hall program was undertaken solely because the money could be spent quickly?

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

I am delighted that the opposition have paid so much attention to that speech. I thought it was a pretty good speech at the time. It did not attract huge coverage, but we were in opposition, so I am delighted they paid so much attention—so much so that I would like to remind them of some of the other things that I referred to in that speech. I referred to the $457 million being spent on government advertising by the previous government in the space of 16 months. I referred to the outrageous regional rorts scandal, where vast sums of money were spent on trains that never existed, cheese factories that closed down before the grant was made and those kinds of things. I had some pretty soft targets to aim at in 2007 when I was talking about quality of government spending, I can tell you.

The underlying point that I made there remains absolutely valid, and this government has been committed to improving the quality of government spending and to reducing the total amount of money that is spent on the processes of government. In the two budgets that we have brought down over the course of our time in office, we had $33 billion of savings over four years in the first budget, $22 billion of savings over four years in the second budget and, of course, very substantial ongoing savings mounting in this year’s budget from a number of initiatives, particularly some of the indexation related initiatives, which will take time to build up. So I would suggest to the Leader of the Opposition, who as a minister was the man who presided over the quintupling, from $2 million to $10 million, of a grant to a bloke who claimed he could make it rain, that he is in no position to hold forth on the quality of government spending and that he is particularly ill-advised to remind anybody of debates about the quality of government spending in 2007.