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

I thank Senator McLucas for that commitment. I will not hold up the Senate much longer, but I just want to explain why I am a bit suspicious. On 16 March the government came into this chamber in relation to another Senate order in the health portfolio. The Senate had ordered the production of about 300 documents in relation to private health insurance reforms. The government made a statement in the Senate that they had to take some time to go through them all but that the information would be provided as soon as possible. It took two months before that information was provided.

I am a bit confused as to why the officials would be confused about my questions. I would refer them back to the answers they provided in response to the relevant Senate order on the RTD measures, which followed on from the Senate estimates process. I am quite happy to provide that in a written form if people have difficulty finding it. But, very specifically, there was a table provided then out of the MYEFO information, after a lot of prodding and searching and asking, which indicated what the expectations were in terms of the sale of RTDs moving forward. These assumptions are quite important because they are the foundation of your revenue estimates. If you are telling us that you expect sales to go down then your revenue estimate of $1.6 billion is absolutely unachievable. Your revenue estimate of $1.6 billion, which is the most recent estimate that I have got in front of me, is based on an assumption by the government that the sale of RTDs will go up by 7.8 per cent from 1 July 2009. I am not inventing that. That is information that I was provided by Treasury out of the MYEFO data. So I would urge people to go and have another look.

The other information I was provided was that the $3.1 billion revenue estimate that was in place at the time of the May 2008 budget announcement had been downgraded to $1.6 billion. Has it been downgraded further? If yes, by how much? I hope that that is clear enough. I am really confused about this, quite frankly, though I assume that the government is not keen to answer these questions here and now, that they would much rather have time to manage the political spin and the PR strategy before releasing that sort of sensitive information.