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

Pursuant to standing order 74(5), I ask the Minister representing the Treasurer for an explanation as to why an answer has not been provided to question on notice No. 437 regarding how much of the stimulus package remains to be spent in 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13 even though that question was asked back on 11 March 2011?

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can indicate to Senator Cormann that my advice is that the response to this question was tabled with the Senate today. I thank him for letting my office know he intended to raise this.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You could have told him.

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz, I was somewhat busy in question time, otherwise I would have sent him a note. I thank him for having the courtesy to raise this with my office this morning.

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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

In doing so, I do express disappointment that we have been waiting for 150 days for some pretty basic information which goes to the government's financial and economic management. We wrote to the minister at 9.30 or 10 o'clock this morning and nobody had the courtesy to let us know that the intention was to table it today. At this point I do not have a copy of the answer, even though the minister was well aware that this issue was going to be raised after question time. I wrote to the minister twice in relation to this. I wrote to the minister back in May, I wrote to the minister again in July. We had a debate about it for 20 minutes back in July, which you might remember, Mr Deputy President Parry, because it was your first opportunity to chair this session with us as the new Deputy President.

We have a government here in Canberra which is incompetent, fiscally reckless and irresponsible, and refuses to be accountable to the parliament. It is just not good enough that the government is unable to provide an answer for 150 days about how much of the stimulus package remains to be spent for 2011-12 and 2012-13. Some of the information sought has since become public through other channels, specifically in relation to 2010-11 and 2011-12. The fact that for 150 days this government refused to provide an answer to a question that should be answered within 30 days would seem to indicate that there is something to hide. I would be very interested to read the answer that finally has been put forward and to see why the government would try to avoid answering a basic question like this for more than 150 days.

We have a bad Labor government here in Canberra which spends too much, borrows too much and taxes too much. Whenever questions are raised this unaccountable Treasurer, who treats the Senate with absolute contempt, refuses to provide answers in a timely and appropriate fashion.

We always have to remind ourselves why this government is now able to brag about the stronger position that Australia is in compared to other countries around the world. The reason we are in a better position than we otherwise would be is because this government inherited a budget with absolutely no government net debt. This government inherited a budget with a $22 billion surplus. This government inherited a budget where we had to spend zero dollars on interest payments servicing the debt that was paid off by the previous government.

We now have an incompetent Treasurer who treats the Senate with contempt, who was not able to provide an answer in good time. Whenever he has something to hide, he goes for the cover-up. And we can well understand why he would go for the cover-up. With the government having inherited a very strong budget position, we are now in a position where four out of four budgets under this government have been deficit budgets. Every single budget that has been put together by the Labor Party has been a deficit budget—every single one of them.

But we were told that 2012-13 was going to be different, that 2012-13 was going to see the historically unprecedented experience of a surplus under this Labor government. The Treasurer, Wayne Swan, was going to deliver a surplus budget in 2012-13, but he was not prepared to tell us how much he was still going to spend on his fiscal stimulus package in 2012-13. I would be very interested to see what the answer says and even now maybe somebody can provide me with a copy of the answer that the govern­ment supposedly has tabled here in the parliament. I think it is quite extraordinary that the minister would just tell us that the answer has been provided without actually giving it to us.

Here we have a government which in 2009-10 spent $28 billion on stimulating the economy through fiscal stimulus—that is, by spending taxpayers' dollars, by borrowing money, by going into debt. Do you know what the Reserve Bank was doing at the same time? In 2009-10 the Reserve Bank increased interest rates six times in a row. This government was completely panicked, they were completely out of their depth and they did what they always do when they do not know what to do. They looked at their Labour friends and at their Democrat friends in other parts of the world. They looked at what Gordon Brown was doing in the UK and they looked at what Barack Obama was doing in the US and they thought that, as they were spending money, as they were spending more and as they were taxing more and going into debt, 'maybe we should do the same'. So off they went and spent $89 billion of taxpayers' dollars. Even at a time when the Reserve Bank was putting on the brakes through monetary policy, this government was still out there stimulating the economy. So you have the Reserve Bank and this incompetent and fiscally reckless and irresponsible government going in opposite directions.

I was very interested to observe that in the US we have had interest rates at record lows—hovering around zero per cent—for a couple of years. In fact, the US Federal Reserve said that interest rates in the US would remain at 0.25 per cent or thereabouts until the middle of 2013. That was their attempt to provide additional impetus to the market. Of course, in the UK and in the US they have been printing money for a number of years. They call it quantitative easing.

I have just had advice that the Senate Table Office as at 3.07 pm, which was three minutes ago and was after Minister Wong said to this chamber that the Treasurer's answer had been tabled, had not received an answer to question on notice No. 437. So here we have Senator Wong misleading the chamber. I hope that Senator Wong has the courtesy to come back into this chamber as this is an absolute disgrace. This incompetent government is treating this Senate with absolute contempt. For more than 150 days it has refused to provide an answer to a very legitimate question about how much of the fiscal stimulus package remains to be spent in 2012-13, and here we have the minister for finance, on behalf of the Treasurer, advising this chamber that an answer was tabled in the Senate, when I have advice now from the Table Office that so far there is still no answer. This government is perpetuating the cover-up. This is an absolutely disgraceful and outrageous contempt of the Senate.

We have a government that has completely mismanaged our public finances. We have a government that inherited a strong budget position but has completely made a mess of it. Every single one of those Labor senators on the other side of the chamber is going to be responsible, in the passage of history, for the mess that they have created. They are making it worse. We are already in a situation where we are looking at $107 billion worth of government net debt. We have had four successive deficits. In question time today, Minister Wong was laying the groundwork, was laying the foundation, for the delivery of a deficit in 2012-13. The words she used were that, oh well, the world has changed. There is always an excuse for yet another Labor deficit. There is always another reason as to why this government cannot live within its means.

The truth of the matter is that we did not need to go this far into debt. We did not need to spend $89 billion worth of taxpayers' dollars—taxpayers' dollars raised today or taxpayers' dollars borrowed against future generations. In Australia our official cash rate bottomed out at three per cent. In 2009-10 alone we had six successive increases in interest rates to take the interest rate in that year from three to 4.5 per cent. Of course, since then we have had another 0.25 per cent increase, to take it up to the current rate of 4.75 per cent. Clearly, there was an opportunity for the Reserve Bank to continue to do its job and to continue to provide stimulus to the economy, if that was required in its judgment, by further lowering interest rates. Our interest rates bottomed out at three per cent and have since gone up to 4.75 per cent but in the UK and in the US they are still at record lows. We know that is one—not the only one, but one—of the reasons why the Australian dollar is in the position that it is in, which is putting further pressure on exporters across Australia. It is one of the reasons why the Australian exchange rate is where it is compared to that of the US.

If only the Reserve Bank had been allowed to do its job and if only the Reserve Bank had not faced a government that was putting billions and billions and billions of dollars of fiscal stimulus into the economy—inefficiently, mind you, through pink batts, through school halls, through the Building the Education Revolution and through all of the inefficient programs that they put out there. It would actually have been much more efficient if the Reserve Bank had been able to effectively put more money into the economy by reducing interest rates, which would have left people with more money in their pocket and they would have allocated their money throughout the economy way more efficiently than this incompetent government could. Instead we have pink batts, school halls and all sorts of things that have been examples of bad and wasteful spending of taxpayers' dollars and we have been left with $107 billion of government net debt—from a start of zero net debt and it is rising. In this budget alone, $26 billion is going to be spent on servicing the interest on the debt that this government has accumulated—and again it is rising.

I make the point here that this incom­petent government is actually going to introduce new multibillion dollar taxes that are going to make us less competitive internationally, that are going to have a serious impact on our economic prosperity into the future. All of that leaves the budget in a worse fiscal position at the end of the process. I will explain: only the Labor Party can come up with a new multibillion dollar tax that would leave the budget in a worse position. We have two examples of this. There is the mining tax, which Treasury tells us will raise about $38½ billion over the decade. Incidentally, $25 billion of that will come from iron ore production in Western Australia. The cost of the related measures—the proposed increase to compulsory super, the company tax cuts and various other measures—is about $57 billion over the same period.

Over the next decade, the budget is going to be about $20 billion worse off than when this government started, further worsening the structural deficit position. This does not even take into account the fact that every time a state government—like the state government in Western Australia, the state government in Queensland or any other state government with resources—makes a decision to remove a royalty concession or to increase royalties, it will be a further black hole in the budget, courtesy of the dodgy mining tax deal that this government entered into with the three big mining companies. No wonder this budget is in a mess. No wonder the Labor Party cannot deliver a surplus budget. Every time they make a decision, the budget is in a worse position than before they started.

I will stay on the mining tax for a moment. The government promised to credit all state and territory royalties to those who have to pay the mining tax. Here we have the government which dodgily and inapprop­riately did a deal behind closed doors—it was exclusive and in secret—with the three big mining companies. Not only were all their competitors excluded; state and territory governments, who just happen to have responsibility for royalty arrangements, were also excluded. Nobody included them in the deal, but here we have this incompetent government making a promise to these three big mining companies. Clearly they stared them down. The three big mining companies got this Prime Minister and this Treasurer to promise to credit all state and territory royalties without the state and territory governments being part of the agreement. In this country, you cannot have tax reform in the area of resource taxation or in the area of royalty arrangements without actively engaging and seeking agreement from state and territory governments. Any competent federal leader would know that and any competent federal Treasurer would know that—except for this Prime Minister and this Treasurer. Of course, this is just one example of incompetence.

There is also the carbon tax. I was there on budget night on Lateline. I was sitting next to the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Senator Wong. We were both giving our assessment of the budget. Senator Wong was saying how fantastic it was, and I was saying, 'It's just not worth the paper it's written on.' Do you know why I said that, Mr Deputy President? The carbon tax informa­tion was not in it. So we said: 'The revenue figures are wrong. The expenditure figures are wrong. The inflation figures are wrong. The economic growth figures are wrong—everything is wrong.' Minister Wong said, not to worry, that it will be broadly budget neutral. We now know that it will not be. The government will raise $25 billion and spend $4.3 billion more. The budget is going to be $4.3 billion worse off, yet again.

I conclude my contribution on this: I cannot believe that Minister Wong has not come in here to explain why she has misled the Senate. I hope that an explanation from the minister will be forthcoming at a later hour. She told us that an answer to the question that I raised had been tabled, when clearly the Table Office has confirmed—and I suspect that it is still the case right now—there is no answer from the Treasurer. I think that is absolutely disgraceful. I look forward to it being provided to us ASAP.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was going to defend Senator Wong from that attack on why she had not answered the question, until I heard that she had actually misled the Senate. She followed her leader's cause of telling mistruths—in her leader's case, lies, deliberate lies, to the Australian public. It was exactly one year ago today that Julia Gillard, the Leader of the Labor Party, promised Australians that there would be 'No carbon tax under a government I lead'. She also promised that she would not introduce a carbon tax until there was a consensus. There was a consensus a year ago, and that was a consensus of most politicians in this parliament that there would be no carbon tax.

I wanted to defend Senator Wong because I can understand why she, on behalf of the Treasurer, has not got the time to answer questions. It is because she has been so busy trying to explain and excuse her leader, Julia Gillard, who deliberately lied to the Australian public a year ago today when she said that there would be 'No carbon tax under a government I lead'. A year ago Senator Wong was the minister for climate change. She was the one running around at Copenhagen who was going to save the world from climate change. She was the one who no doubt joined with her leader in putting forward this solemn promise to the Australian public that there would be no carbon tax under a government Julia Gillard led. And I can understand why Senator Wong has since that moment been so busy trying to explain that deliberate and outright lie of her leader, Julia Gillard.

One might understand why Senator Wong was not able to pass on the answer from the Treasurer. Could I also just perhaps offer a little helpful advice not only to Senator Wong but to all of the ministers on the other side. If Senator Wong, and she is the principal offender, at question time actually tried to answer a question, perhaps there would not be as many questions put on notice because we would get the answers in question time, which is what question time is all about. We in this chamber and the Australian public expect that at question time the government is asked questions about its administration of the government and we and the Australian public expect that reasonably competent ministers might be able to answer those questions in question time.

Very few of the ministers on the other side, perhaps with the exception of Senator Sherry, can ever answer a question without notice. When she is asked a question Senator Wong has adopted the tactic—and just bear my words on this, and look through theHansardwhereby, for the first half of her time, at least, for answering questions she chooses to attack the questioner. It happened today, but that is not unusual. She does it all the time. I would suggest to Senator Wong and other ministers in this chamber that if they were to put a little more effort into actually answering questions rather than attacking the questioner, or rather than talking about anything except what the question is about, there would perhaps be fewer questions put on notice and we would not have the sort of debate and anger that comes up when governments cannot answer questions after 135 days, as it is in this case.

I urge government ministers to try and have a go at answering questions put to them. If you have not got a clue on the answer, which is basically all of the time, can you just sit down instead of wasting the Senate's time in attacking the questioner. In that way we may not have so many questions needing to be put on notice.

Question agreed to.