Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, pictured with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, released details of the Coalition's costings on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen But the figures released on Wednesday represent only the savings the Coalition would make to the budget, and not the budget bottom line. The Coalition claims its "signature policy" of a paid parental leave scheme, due to start in July 2015, will actually add $1.1 billion to the budget during its first two years, by the time all the associated savings are counted. The savings include about $5 billion for scrapping the existing commonwealth and state parental leave schemes. A 1.5 per cent tax on large companies, which the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates will raise $4.4 billion over the first two years of the scheme, will also help cover the costs of the scheme. At a press conference in Canberra on Wednesday morning, Mr Hockey confirmed the Coalition would make no cuts to health or education, nor would it increase the GST, as Labor has been warning.

"There are no great shocks here," Mr Hockey said. "The great shock is that Kevin Rudd is being proven to have made hysterical and unsubstantiated claims about the Coalition". The document also said that it would keep the ''savings initiatives'' announced by Labor in the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook earlier this month, except for the changes on fringe benefits tax for motor vehicles. ''We don't like a number of them, but we have to do it to be prudent,'' Mr Hockey said. Earlier, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said that the Coalition's document exposed the ''big lies'' at the heart of Labor's campaign. ''We can fund the major initiatives that we've announced in this campaign without cutting health, without cutting education, without touching pensions, without changing the GST – in other words, everything that is at the basis of Mr Rudd's campaign, the series of big lies that are the basis of Mr Rudd's campaign, are exposed as simple falsehoods,'' Mr Abbott said.

These savings are in addition to the $17 billion in savings already announced, bringing the total savings to $31.6 billion over the forward estimates from a range of measures including scrapping Labor's carbon tax and mining tax packages. The Coalition says the biggest saving will come from reducing the public service by 12,000 people, saving $5.2 billion over the budget forward estimates. It would also save 1.3 billion over four years by cutting Australia's humanitarian migrant intake by 6250 people each year and $3.7 billion by dropping Labor's superannuation guarantee for low-income Australians. Mr Hockey said the savings he had identified made up the ''great bulk'' of those the Coalition needed to find. ''The Coalition is absolutely committed to living within its means,'' he said.

During their debate on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Canberra, Mr Hockey and Mr Bowen disagreed most notably on the question of when they could commit to returning the budget to surplus. Mr Bowen insisted Labor would deliver a surplus in 2016-17, as stated in the budget. Mr Hockey said he was not going to make the same mistake as the former treasurer, Wayne Swan, who gave "big heroic promises" about when he would deliver a surplus. "We will get to surplus when it is reasonable, responsible to do so," Mr Hockey said. Mr Bowen retorted that Mr Hockey was showing "a lot of huff, a lot of puff, a lot of bluster, a lot of blowing ... [but] no date". Mr Hockey was asked to clarify his promise on Wednesday that an Abbott government, if elected, would make no cuts to health or education funding.

"You said today that there'd be no cuts to education or health," a journalist asked. "Does that apply to the full three-year term, for example after the commission of audit?" Mr Hockey dodged the question. Earlier, Mr Hockey defended his decision not to release any of the assumptions or calculations behind any of the PBO estimates. The shadow treasurer said he would do so if Labor released the workings behind the Treasury estimates that inform its policies. The Coalition established a panel to look at its costings, comprising Access Economics co-founder Geoff Carmody, former Queensland Auditor-General Len Scanlon and former department of prime minister and cabinet secretary Peter Shergold. Mr Hockey said the policies were costed by the PBO, before being assessed by the Coalition's panel of ''three wise men'', but he declined to release the PBO costings.

He said he would release the PBO's costings only when Labor releases all of Treasury's working papers. Despite Mr Hockey's claim that ''no other opposition has done this'' in releasing detailed costings, the Coalition's tax policy, released in 1987, ran to 67 pages, and included graphs and breakdowns of costing assumptions. It was released on June 13, 1987, almost a month before the July 11 election. Fightback! – among the most comprehensive policy documents ever released in Australia – was released in 1991, more than a year before the election. Earlier on Wednesday, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd dismissed the figures, comparing the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme with former Liberal leader John Hewson's ''dog'' of a GST policy in the 1993 election, which the Coalition lost. Mr Rudd, who was campaigning in his Brisbane seat of Griffith, said the Coalition's costings were ''not worth the paper it's written on''.

''For the life of me, guys, I can't work out why this bloke [Abbott] thinks it's a fair go to provide $75,000 for a billionaire to go off and have a baby,'' Mr Rudd told supporters earlier. with AAP