LANE: Penny Wong, good morning. Welcome to AM.
WONG: Good to be with you.
LANE: Mr Abbott's promising a more adult government with no nasty surprises and no more excuses. Surely those messages will cut through?
WONG: Well, I think when it comes to nasty surprises he made really clear last night that his game plan is all about nasty surprises. A Commission of Audit is nothing more than a commission for cuts and he made clear last night where he would want to go, where Liberals always go, which is to hit working Australians. That's what Liberals do and that's what he made clear last night and he will go further should he become prime minister.
LANE: Polling research company JW Scales conducted some focus group work on Wednesday night following the budget. It found, quote, a dangerous mix of disinterest in what the Government has to say and disappointment with what the Budget offered.
WONG: Well, if this was such a bad Budget, why has Tony Abbott backed it in, because that's what he did last night. This is a Budget that does two things; it ensures we keep our economy growing and we keep jobs growing. Remember 960,000 jobs since Labor came to government and an economy that is 13 per cent bigger.
So when Tony Abbott says he wants to get growth up, let's remember of couple of things. One is, we've been growing as an economy and the second thing is he opposed the stimulus package which has kept Australia out of recession.
But the second thing that the budget did was lay out a plan for the future. Our plan for schools reform, ensuring no Australian child gets left behind in the way that we currently are leaving too many children behind, and of course DisabilityCare, a great reform.
LANE: According to that research as well, this following statement reflects broad attitudes of those who took part: "I just don't listen to what Gillard has to say anymore". Have voters stopped listening?
WONG: What I'd say is elections are about a choice as to what sort of country you want. And I think Tony Abbott has made very clear what sort of country he would want. He wants a nation in which working people get hit, where he hacks into the superannuation of 8.4 million working Australians. Where he puts a tax hike on the lowest paid people in Australia that's what his removal of the low income super contribution does. He wants an Australia where we have inequitable school system. And what he wants even more is a commission for cuts that he's not going to be upfront about before an election.
We know what Liberals do, Sabra. We've seen these Commission of Audits game-plans before. We've seen it under Peter Costello, we saw it under Jeff Kennett and we saw it very recently in Queensland under Premier Newman. I think Queenslanders know what Commissions of Audits are all about. They are an excuse for Liberal cuts, cutting too hard and in the wrong places.
LANE: He's also promising tax reform. Mr Abbott says that there'll be a white paper on this if the Coalition is successful in September with a broad discussion in the community about the recommendations, and that changes that the Coalition decides to adopt it will take to the following election and make it, seek a mandate.
WONG: He also said a few months ago that there'd be no unexpected adverse changes to superannuation and that's what he announced last night. This is the man who took $1 billion out of public hospitals. We know where Mr Abbott's values are, and his values are very clearly... he is prepared to hit working Australians, he's prepared to hit their superannuation and what he wants to do is to hide as much detail of these cuts as possible until after the election. What we got last night was just a taste of what his plans really are.
LANE: Greg Hunt on this program yesterday said a senior official had told him the only figures that the public could trust would be the numbers in the pre-election budget outlook.
WONG: Does anybody believe Greg Hunt? Seriously, I mean this is a well, does anybody out there really believe Greg Hunt? I mean this is a bloke who has no credibility even in his own party room.
This is slander and it's the usual, the usual thing you get from Greg Hunt where he puts all sorts of things on the public record which aren't then backed up from a bloke who used to say the only way to deal with climate change was to price carbon, now running around with a great taxpayer-funded scheme that would cost Australian families $1,300 a year in extra tax.
LANE: But if there is a great big difference between the budget numbers and figures that we saw this week and the figures that are published in that fiscal update, come just before the election, what are the public to think?
WONG: Sabra, I know the Liberals want you to think that the forecasts are dodgied up. They're not. They're not; these are the numbers. These are the numbers that are given to the Government. These are the numbers that Treasury, the same people who provided forecasts to Peter Costello, provide this Government with forecasts.
But let's just take Tony Abbott's logic a bit further. If he says the forecasts are wrong and they're too optimistic, you know where that takes you? In only one direction: more cuts. Because if he says the figures are actually worse, it's exactly what I was saying before. It means you've got to cut harder and we all know what he would do: cut in the wrong places and hit the wrong people.
ENDS