'We cannot repair the budget overnight, but we can start,' the shadow treasurer Joe Hockey says

The Coalition has unveiled $31.6bn in savings – the “vast bulk” of its spending cuts – which it insists will leave the budget in “a slightly better condition” by the end of the first term of an Abbott government.

After three years of attacking Labor for not delivering its promised budget surpluses and after declaring the nation faced a “budget emergency”, the Coalition is lowering expectations about how quickly it will be able to get the budget back into the black and refusing to nominate a date by which it will do so.

“We cannot repair the budget overnight, but we can start,” the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said as he released the costings ahead of a debate at the National Press Club with the treasurer, Chris Bowen.

“We will leave the budget in net terms better than Labor. We are going to turn around the budget and get it heading in the right direction,” he said, but added that this had to be done prudently and carefully.

During the debate he said he was “not asking for a ‘trust me’ cheque from the Australian people” but declined to nominate a date by which he would deliver a surplus because, “I am not going to make the mistake Labor made of making big heroic promises that are never delivered.”

Bowen said Hockey had delivered “a lot of huff, a lot of puff, a lot of bluster, a lot of blowing, but no date”.

“You can’t trust an alternative government if they are not prepared to fulfil the most basic obligation of outlining to the Australian people the budget bottom line impact of their policies … [The Coalition] has made the political calculation that … it is better to put it all off to a commission of audit to provide a licence for cuts after the election,” Bowen said, repeating Labor’s forecast for a small surplus is 2016-17.

The Coalition has released the four-year total savings from a list of measures, but not the detailed costings from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) to back the figures. Nor has it yet released the detailed costings for its spending promises.

Most of the savings listed by the Coalition over the four years of budget estimates come from policies which were to be funded by the carbon and mining taxes, which the Coalition has pledged to abolish, including many measures that were welcomed by business at the time.

On top of already announced savings, including the abolition of the schoolkids bonus, the low-income superannuation guarantee, the supplementary allowance for unemployment benefit recipients, reversing the increase in the refugee intake and reducing the public service by 12,000, the Coalition has now also promised to abolish:

• The instant asset write-off which allows small businesses to write off up to $6,500 worth of purchases on things such as office equipment and computers against their tax liability (saving the government $2.89bn).

• The tax loss carry back, which allows companies to offset losses from the current financial year against tax already paid during more profitable years, up to a limit of $1m for each year (saving $900m).

• Accelerated depreciation for cars (saving $400m).

• The phase-down of interest withholding tax, which is paid primarily by financial institutions (saving $400m).

It has also said it will not proceed with measures funded from Labor’s carbon tax including $5bn worth of business compensation. That figure includes $4bn from abolishing the free carbon permits offered to trade-exposed business, which is a saving in fiscal terms but does not impact on the budget’s underlying cash balance since they were offered for free in the first place.

The Coalition will also abolish assistance to the steel and coal industries, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Climate Change Authority and make cuts to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Despite heavily criticising many of the savings announced by the government in the economic statement brought down shortly before the election campaign, the Coalition has said it will proceed with all of them, except the changes to fringe benefits tax for company cars.

“We don’t like a number of them,” Hockey said, but they were necessary in difficult economic times.

While not detailed in the Coalition’s costings document, those measures include:

• Another "efficiency dividend" for the federal public service – cutting an additional 2.25% from the bureaucracy in each of the next three years to save $1.8bn.

• A $5.8bn increase to cigarette excise.

• $733m from the new bank levy to pay for a financial stability fund

Hockey said the figures proved Labor’s claims about the Coalition’s intended cuts were “hysterical” and that there was no $70bn black hole in the Coalition’s costings. He repeated the Coalition’s pledge to make no cuts to health or education.

Hockey said the Coalition was facing an economic “mountain” of rising unemployment and slowing growth and said he thought the Reserve Bank had come “close to the end of its capacity” to stimulate the economy through cuts to official interest rates.

Most of the Coalition costings have been worked through with the PBO and checked by a “panel of experts” comprising Access Economics co-founder Geoff Carmody, former Queensland auditor general Len Scanlon and former secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Peter Shergold.

The Coalition also released the costings of its paid parental leave, totalled over the first four years, which showed – as already mooted – that the cost of the scheme is more than covered by the 1.5% levy on big business, the decision to deny shareholders tax credits in relation to that 1.5% impost, the abolition of the existing federal government paid parental leave scheme, the rolling in of existing state government schemes and consequential increases in personal tax payments and reductions in family tax benefit payments for the families getting more money from parental leave.

According to the costing, which was checked by the PBO but is not broken down by year, the overall impact is a $1.1bn boost to the budget bottom line over the four-year period.