Does Richard Marles agree that there needs to be rules put in place that costings are released much earlier in the campaign?

Marles:

I think people can make their own judgement about the confidence of the Coalition in respect of their costings, that they left it until a moment when five million Australians are already voted. One in four Australians had already voted. That says everything about how they saw their own costings. What we got, ultimately, was a complete joke.

There is barely any detail. They are talking – despite the fact that they have made clear their intent to engage in wholesale cuts to front line public services, to health, to pensions and the like, that is what they will need to do. They haven’t been able to explain how they are going to pay for things like the tax breaks for business lunches.

They haven’t been able to explain where their $350 billion of cuts are coming from before you get to a point of explaining the $600 billion that they will need to provide for in order to do a nuclear-powered scheme.

None of that is there and, despite all of that, the one thing they did tell us is for two of the three years of the next term in government, they will be worse off in terms of the Budget bottom line than Labor. It is a joke and it is not surprising that they left it so late.