Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Flynn for his question. The numbers in the responsible budget that I handed down last night are the outcome of the efforts of all Australians to make our economy strong and to make our economy the envy of the developed world. Of course the credit for that goes to employers and to employees, who all came together at a very critical time for our economy. It is a budget which says to all Australians, let us turn the successes of the recent past into a stronger economy for working families. It is a budget that returns to surplus and pays down debt ahead of every other major advanced economy. The government will halve peak debt and will get the budget in the black in three years—three years early. This is part of the fastest positive turnaround in the fiscal position since the 1960s. How has this been done? It has been done by imposing a two per cent spending cap over the forward estimates, and it has also been done by offsetting all new spending—unlike those opposite, who went into the election year every time spending like drunken sailors.

What we have done is impose on ourselves the discipline that we said we would impose on the budget last year when we took the responsible action to stimulate our economy to support small business and to support employment. So the policy successes of the past 18 months now mean that the Australian economy is recovering powerfully. The budget forecasts growth of 3¼ per cent in 2010-11 and four per cent in 2011-12 and, as the Prime Minister said before, an unemployment rate of 5.3 per cent, the envy of the developed world. If you look around the world you can see what an extraordinary effort that has been: employers and employees cooperating to make sure that breadwinners had a job, to make sure that they had a pay packet coming in to put food on the table, to make sure that small businesses had a pipeline of activity.

That is what we did last year and, now the economy is recovering, what we need to do and are doing in this budget is putting in place a very strict fiscal discipline. Of course that strict fiscal discipline means that we can get on with our reform program. That means that we can put in place the biggest improvements to health and hospitals in over 30 years, something supported very strongly on this side of the House and certainly not understood by the Leader of the Opposition. It means we can invest in the skills of our workforce, that we can invest in infrastructure and that we can invest in renewable energy and clean energy and it means that we can boost savings through boosting superannuation. Of course it means that we can give a real boost to the small business sector. These are all important reforms for the future and they are all built on fiscal discipline, on financial discipline, so much so that this is what the rating agency Standard and Poor’s had to say last night: this budget ensures Australia’s public finances ‘remain among the strongest of its peer group’. So this side of the House is proud of Australia’s economic performance and we are very optimistic about the years ahead. This responsible budget puts in place the framework for strong growth and it means that we can turn the success during the global financial crisis into a stronger economy for working families.

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