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

I find the interjections from those opposite interesting, given that as they exited office they were sitting on levels of expenditure growth on the part of government which are almost right up there with the Australian Guinness Book of Records: 4.5 per cent real at a time when we needed to be reining it in. Instead those opposite were saying, ‘Here’s another bucket of kerosene. Let’s throw it onto the fires of inflation,’ and, of course, pretending all along that there was no problem with inflation to start with.

As we approach this budget, what this country has been plagued with for far too long has been short-termism: governments delivering one budget after another driven by the short term rather than the long term, one budget after another driven by the electoral cycle rather than by the decade ahead and one budget after another—as we have seen over the last 12 long years—where we have seen repeatedly the triumph of politics over policy.

The mood of the nation and the need of the nation now demand that we change. Therefore, we are about to embark upon a new period of responsible economic management—an era that places the budget squarely in the centre of a framework for long-term economic reform for the nation. This is not simply a budget-eve series of bribes, a series of handouts, all with an eye to the next election but, instead, we are taking seriously the long-term fundamental requirements of economic reform—‘economic reform’: words which barely crossed the lips of those opposite as one budget after another was delivered from this dispatch box.

In framing the budget, the government has confronted difficult economic times: a global financial crisis which is now impacting on real levels of economic growth in North America, across Europe and into our own East Asian hemisphere. While those developments unfold abroad, we are faced also with the challenge of inflation at home. This, however, has not deterred the government from embarking upon an approach to the framing of the budget which has three core pillars—firstly, responsible economic management, given the need to fight inflation; secondly—

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