Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I will take Minister Wong's interjection about a $70 billion black hole. It is a complete furphy. It is one of these Labor lies. It is one of these things where the government, because they are so desperate, think that they have to verbal shadow spokespeople. This is such a desperate government that, whenever they do not have any explanations for their repeated stuff-ups and fiscal incompetence, they have got to come up with yet another furphy.

This government is introducing all these multibillion-dollar new taxes, and they are talking about the revenue from these taxes as if there were no expenditure linked to it, no expenditure at all. They are talking about the revenue from these taxes as if they were not going to spend billions and billions of dollars in the context of increasing compulsory super, something that we have said we would not do. They are talking about it as if somehow this revenue is going to be in some vacuum—they are going to have all this revenue from the mining tax and there is no cost related to it all. They want to talk about it as if it is something that is going to go straight to the bottom line. I know that Minister Wong knows better than this. I know that she is playing the political game and wanting to verbal the shadow Treasurer and the shadow finance minister because it suits her political purposes. It is time for a bit of a reality check, Minister, and the reality check is this: you inherited a very strong fiscal position, you have made a mess of it, you have delivered four deficit budgets in a row and you are putting new taxes in and linking spending to them, which is going to leave the budget in a worse position instead of a better one, and that is just completely irresponsible.