Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. In those weeks before the election the Prime Minister was everywhere, promising to help reduce cost-of-living pressures on Australian families. Australians will now pay a petrol tax every time they fill up their cars—in the city, in the country, every time. Why should Australian families pay for this Prime Minister's false and misleading conduct?

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I give the call to the honourable Prime Minister. He will ignore the term 'misleading' as it can be dealt with in other forms of the House.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do not especially like some of the things that we have had to do to clean up Labor's debt and deficit disaster. I do not especially like that, and in a different world we would have been able to have a different budget. But in the real world—the world that we have inherited from the Labor Party—we have to clean up the debt and deficit disaster. We have to clean up the debt and deficit disaster. We have to accept that fact that the soft options that were peddled for six years by the Labor Party are simply no longer available to the Australian people.

We were elected not to make the easy decisions but to make the hard ones. We were elected not to squib things but to embrace the difficult decisions that were needed to secure this country's future. That is what we were elected to do. We were elected to put the budget back under control. And on no fewer than 31 separate occasions during the election campaign that is exactly what I promised.

I promised that we would stop the boats, that we would scrap the carbon tax, that we would build the roads of the 21st century and that we would get the budget back under control. I am very proud to say that that is exactly what happened on Tuesday night. I am very pleased to say that this is a government with the intestinal fortitude to do the things that members opposite always lacked the guts to do. We did not create the debt and deficit disaster. We did not create it, but we take responsibility for fixing it. Fix it, we will. And we are fixing it in ways that are fair. We are fixing it in ways that are fair and I am very pleased to have this opportunity to wrap up question time on budget week by saying that we have risen to the challenge of these times. We have risen to the challenge of these times by delivering the budget that Australia needs to deal with the debt and deficit disaster that the Labor Party gave us. We have risen to that challenge.

On that note I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.