Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The third pillar of our approach to economic policy is to deal with these areas of long-term neglect for the future. If you are in receipt, as the previous government has been, of significant revenues flowing from the resources boom, the responsible course of action would be to invest that in the long-term capacity needs of the economy, in infrastructure and in education and also to deal with the chronic problems in our health and hospital system. This, therefore, is a necessary additional discipline which we will apply to the budget and economic policy process.

In framing this budget, these are our three pillars: firstly, responsible economic management—cutting government expenditure and producing sizeable government surpluses to fight inflation; secondly, helping working families under financial pressure; and, thirdly, assisting with the long-term provision which we need to invest in of education, infrastructure, climate change and, of course, health and hospitals.

We were elected on a platform of governing as economic conservatives, and we intend to govern as economic conservatives when it comes to the question of ensuring proper custodianship of public finance. We take seriously the responsibility of producing a sizeable government surplus. Those opposite, apparently, by saying that there is no economic case to cut government expenditure, do not.

On top of that, this government is committed to an activist approach to microeconomic reform policy. We will ensure that the overall task of productivity growth is advanced through the policy instruments available to government. This is the architecture which underpins our approach to the important fiscal document which the Treasurer will release tonight. This underpins and underlines the government’s overall long-term economic strategy—all about the long term, not about the short term.

See this speech in context