Mr ENTSCH(12.14 p.m.) —I rise today in support of the Charter of Budget Honesty Bill. I say at the beginning that this has to be one of the most refreshing pieces of legislation to come out of this House in recent times, but I find it rather distasteful as an Australian that we as a government are being forced to enact legislation which in effect enshrines honesty as part of the political process. Honesty should be inherent in everything we do as representatives of the Australian people. Indeed, it is unfortunate, to say the least, that truth has become a victim of what today is seen as political necessity.

US Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917 is quoted as saying that in war the first casualty is truth. The same can possibly be said of what has come to pass in modern Australian politics, as perfected by the previous government—when elections come, the first casualty is the truth. Our predecessors in government turned that concept into an art form. A now retired senator even had the gall to enshrine the misleading of the Australian people for political gain in the title of his book, Whatever it takes.

But just what did it take for the ALP to bring about the need for legislation such as this? What did it take for the Australian people to eventually develop enough cynicism about Labor promises to finally treat Labor's political manipulation with the contempt it deserved and toss them out on their collective ears?

We have laws in place in this country that make it an offence for company directors to mislead their shareholders in financial matters. But never in corporate history has a board of directors tried to cover up a $10 billion deficit. That is what happened at last year's election when the leaders of the Labor Party, the then board of directors, tried to mislead their shareholders, the Australian people, to the tune of $10 billion. I repeat that—$10 billion. That is one followed by seven zeros—probably more zeroes than Group Captain Clive `Killer' Caldwell saw during the three years of the last war that he was involved in.

For such infamous deception in any other area of Australian life, criminal charges would be laid. But, in this case, the only penalty the nation can inflict on the perpetrators is annihilation at the ballot-box—which, fortunately for the future of Australia, proved to be the case for the Keating government.

But the saddest aspect of all of this is that the level of government morality and accountability has been allowed to descend to such depths of contempt for the people and proper and moral government process that politicians currently rate the same as snake oil salesmen in public esteem. Is it any wonder, given the Labor doctrine of `whatever it takes', that politicians in this country are now held in the low esteem that they are?

Many of us coming into this job do so with the intent of serving the people with honour and honesty. Unfortunately, those on the other side of this House, who see themselves as the movers and shakers of what passes for modern Labor political doctrine, contemptuously attribute such attitudes to the height of naivety.

I listened earlier to the member for Jagajaga (Ms Macklin) criticising us for a whole range of cuts in various services. It is very difficult to preside over some of those cuts. But from a business perspective, if you expect to see money in the bank to do a particular job but when you go to the bank to start to write cheques are told that you are well and truly in overdraft and cannot draw on those cheques, you have to look for some other way of addressing the problem because, if you do not deal with it now, it will only continue to grow.

This is one of the big problems we found when we got into government. There were a whole range of services mentioned—meals on wheels, aged care, disabled services and mental health—that we would all love to see a lot more money put into. I can assure you that in the electorate of Leichhardt one of the things we really need is regional services and infrastructure. Unfortunately, we have to sit back a little and wait. That is unfortunate because we have been missing out for a long time. It is about time we got our fair share. But when the money has been squandered and we go into government hoping to rectify some of these problems and find such a massive deficit, it makes it almost impossible to provide the kind of service we would like to.

I can remember that, during the course of the previous campaign, we pushed very hard for the then Prime Minister, Mr Keating, to come clean and tell us what the financial situation was. We were continually reassured that everything was in order, that there was not a problem, that the figures and facts we were given were quite accurate. Of course, that is basically what we had to accept. We had no way of finding out if anything was different. So we had to base our budgets, our planning and our commitments on those figures that were available on the day.

As I said earlier, $10 billion is a hell of a lot of money to have to find—in anybody's language—and it is just totally impossible to do that. That is very unfortunate. The cynicism of the Australian people continues to grow because they do not realise just how difficult it is. It is important to try to cover that sort of thing, and we all have to suffer the pain for it.

It is important that we make sure that, in the future, we do not put governments in the same situation we found ourselves in on 2 March. One does not need too much intelligence to realise that the Australian voting public is heartily sick and tired of such deception. Those who desert the honest Aussie discipline of `a fair go for all' will pay the penalty for diminished respect by being tossed into political oblivion.

I would hope that this bill—the Charter of Budget Honesty Bill—is the start of a whole raft of bills that will see the uplifting of political morality and accountability to the people of this nation. It is also my hope that legislation from my government will also enshrine in law the concept of truth in political advertising as part of the healing process between the political process and the Australian people. We as a government have the intestinal fortitude to wear our accountability on our sleeve and to set the scene for the demise of political deception by enshrining in legislation the right of the Australian shareholders to know exactly what is the financial state of their company, Australia.

With the passing of this bill, when the voting public goes to the polls for the next time, they will do so with the solemn assurance that the fiscal facts upon which they are basing their voting decision will be the truth and not a `whatever it takes' bid to obtain power at any cost. It is contemptuous for any government to think that they can fool all of the people all of the time, but that is the contempt with which the Labor Party held the Australian people. Its record of broken promises, deceptions, untruths, illusory and creative national accounting have relegated the honour of this parliament to the depths from which it is now viewed by the Australian people. I for one take particular exception to being relegated to those depths, but it is with a real hope for the future that I gladly take part in the legislative process that will change these perceptions. Governments must be judged on their performance, not on perceptions and illusions created by deception. This bill will achieve that.

With the secretaries to the Treasury and the Department of Finance preparing a pre-election report which provides an up-to-date fiscal and economic outlook assessment, never again will political parties have the opportunity to attempt to deceive the Australian people to the massive extent that proved to be the case in 1996. Never again will the contemptuous `whatever it takes' doctrine replace what should be and always should have been the basic precept of good government—the truth. Never again will truth be the first casualty of the election process.