Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome a question from Senator Brandis on the economy. As the Senate would know, the government has just delivered a midyear budget update in which we took quite many billions of dollars worth of savings to return the budget to surplus. Of course we stand by that forecast, and we are on track to deliver it. The fact that we took the sorts of savings that we did at this time, at a time when we saw some $22 billion written down in terms of revenue to government—something which those opposite may not understand; that we are a lower taxing government than the Howard government—