Federal election 2016: Coalition to launch attack on Bill Shorten’s $200 billion blowout
THE Coalition will today accuse Labor of engineering a spending trajectory that will lead to a massive $200 billion blowout within just 10 years.
Federal Election
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THE Coalition will today launch its first major campaign attack over the economy by accusing Bill Shorten of presiding over a four-year spending blackhole of $66 billion.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will also accuse Labor of engineering a spending trajectory that will lead to a massive $200 billion blowout within just 10 years.
Labor, however, has already aggressively dismissed the Coalition’s figures as “pure fantasy” — claiming the numbers have no credibility.
As Mr Turnbull attempts to steer the election campaign back to a war footing over economic management, The Daily Telegraph can reveal that internal Liberal Party polling shows 39 per cent of voters are concerned about the direction of the economy and their own job security.
The Prime Minister’s ability to win the economic argument is not assured, and despite a record number of voters who are dissatisfied with his performance, he is still marked up as the better man to lead the country.
Since the campaign began, Labor has embarked on a spending spree of announcements amounting to an average of $1 billion every 48 hours.
Mr Shorten has outspent Mr Turnbull by 20 to 1, having so far in the campaign pledged more than $8 billion in new spending promises compared to a modest $413 million for the Coalition.
As Opposition Leader, Mr Bill Shorten has booked more than 60 spending initiatives totalling $30.4 billion over the next four years.
The Coalition argues that this is on top of $18.5 billion in government savings measures blocked by Labor in the Senate or which Labor has signalled it would oppose and therefore have to pay for.
And it claims there is another $34 billion-plus in government cuts to programs which Labor plans to restore.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann will argue that Labor has only $16 billion in tax or savings measures, which would lead to a spending black hole of $66.87 billion.
And if taken over 10 years — even accounting for Mr Shorten’s Budget In Reply promise of $71 billion in tax and revenue savings — the total Labor blowout would reach a staggering $198 billion.
“Every day Bill Shorten is making more unfunded promises which he won’t be able to deliver, because the money isn’t there to pay for them,” Mr Cormann said.
“He might think it’s a joke to put one unfunded promise after the other on to his speedometer, but in the end it would be hardworking families who would be hit with the bill.”
Labor has claimed that the numbers have no credibility, considering some of the blocked measures that the Coalition is including in its numbers have not even been put to parliament yet.
“This figure is so outlandish, so ridiculous, it goes beyond satire and into the realm of pure fantasy,” opposition finance spokesman Tony Burke said yesterday.
“Malcolm Turnbull spent the final week of parliament trying to hide the cost of his $50 billion big business Budget tax cut — and yet now he invents costs and policies that Labor hasn’t even announced.”
Originally published as Federal election 2016: Coalition to launch attack on Bill Shorten’s $200 billion blowout
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