Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McLucas, we have just very helpfully and very constructively provided you with a set of budget papers—and I have a set of budget papers over here. You might say that this is not about the budget bills, but this is a measure that was part of last year’s budget. The only target in last year’s budget was a fiscal target. There was no public health target, no target to reduce binge drinking, no target to reduce alcohol abuse and no target to reduce alcohol abuse related harm. There was one target: that was a fiscal target. That target was that you wanted to raise $3.1 billion worth of revenue.

Through estimates, we sought to assess—as is properly the role of Senate estimates committees—the performance of your government against that target, and your government was ducking and weaving. When I first asked, through the Senate estimates process, how much additional revenue you had raised as a result of this measure, the answer that outrageously first came back was that the information was not publicly available, as if Senate committees can only ask questions about things that are on the public record. It was outrageous. You forced us to come into this chamber and to propose an order of the Senate ordering you to produce the information that, quite frankly, you should have been able to provide on the spot during Senate estimates. That is when we found out that your revenue estimate had collapsed. But by then you had had enough time to develop your political strategy and your failure to meet the fiscal target was sold as evidence of your success in achieving the alleged public health target.

You are continuing to play the same games. We are here doing the right thing. We are here to validate revenue that you have collected so far without the validation of parliament. We want to know how you are performing against the revenue estimates that you have put into the budget. Last night the government tabled another budget. I want to know whether you continue to assume that the sale of RTDs will go up by 7.8 per cent every year from 1 July forward—because, as recently as December 2008, that was your expectation. Your evidence that this measure has worked, which is based on the premise that this year’s sales are down and so binge drinking must be down, is shot down in flames by the fact that your government expects sales to increase as of 1 July 2009 by 7.8 per cent every year. If you have revised it, I would like to know. Surely you should be able to point without much problem to what the revised revenue estimate is. And I want it adjusted such that it is actually comparable—apples with apples. Compared to the $3.1 billion down to the $1.6 billion, what is your revised revenue estimate as a result of the measure that was introduced in April 2008 and, in the presence of this increased level of taxation on RTDs, what is your expectation moving forward in terms of sales volumes of RTDs?