Mr CREAN (2:03 PM) —My question is to the Treasurer. I ask him whether he recalls telling the National Press Club on 17 May 1995:

Do you recall showing the structural deficit in your first budget? Why didn't you show it in yesterday's budget? Is it because it would show you, as Access Economics have stated, in deficit to the tune of $5.6 billion?

Mr COSTELLO (Treasurer) —The question was I think: why didn't you show a structural deficit in your budget papers last night? The reason is that it is a structural surplus. You cannot show a structural deficit in these budget papers—a point which I thought was rather eloquently made in Budget Paper No. 1, part 4, Fiscal Strategy, which no doubt you have read in great detail. As the government which introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty, the government complies with it in totality.

Mr Crean —It hasn't honoured it; it's dishonoured it.

Mr COSTELLO —I hear interjections from the member for Hotham on the Charter of Budget Honesty. The funny thing is that, when we were elected in March 1996 and I went looking for the Labor Party's charter of budget honesty, it could not be found. There was no charter of budget honesty. A charter of budget honesty was enacted in this country for one reason and one reason only: to ensure that the kind of deceit and deception which was practised by the Labor Party in its 1994-95 and 1995-96 budgets was never repeated. The infamous claim by the then Minister for Finance that a budget which was $10 billion in deficit on an underlying basis—an outcome which came out three months after the election—was a surplus led to the enactment of the Charter of Budget Honesty, put in place, as always, by this government, complied with by this government, to put aside the kind of deceit that the Labor Party used to practise. This latest tactic of the Labor Party to somehow claim that the government is as bad as the Labor Party was we take as quite a serious allegation against us.