Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. Thursday sense of humour. On the question that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition asked, let me be very clear in the answering of it. The opposition, we know, is full of climate change deniers. Now it is apparently full of global financial crisis deniers.

They are in denial of the facts about the federal budget and the circumstance of the global economy and the outworkings of the global financial crisis. What they are in particular denial about is revenue write-downs, which have become transparent recently, and the fact that the amount of revenue per unit of GDP is lower than was expected by Treasury and, indeed, is lower than at any time since the early 1990s. Treasury, using the normal economic models and the economic personnel that the Howard government relied on in office, did their best to project where revenue would be and the economy has not performed in accordance with those expectations in the generation of revenue.

That means that, as a government, you have a clear choice. You could seek to match those revenue write-downs with further budget cutbacks. That is a choice that would be available to you. I refer the Deputy Leader of the Opposition to the write-downs in MYEFO, for example, which were in the order of $4 billion this year. You could choose to cut $4 billion out of the budget to match that revenue write-down. The problem is that it would be a major risk for jobs and growth to take a policy position of matching those revenue write-downs with further savings. So that is not the policy position the government has taken. We are dealing with a real world with real facts and, most importantly of all, real consequences for Australian families and their ability to get and hold a job. We have elected to make sure we manage the economy to maximise the ability of Australians to have good work. (Time expired)

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