Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. As I was saying, if we want to protect our living standards, if we want to build opportunity and prosperity for the future, there is no alternative to the budget that we have delivered, because the spending growth trajectory that we inherited from the Labor Party was unsustainable, unaffordable and unrealistic.

Senator Wong interjecting—

I hear Senator Wong interjecting here. There used to be a time when Senator Wong as the Minister for Finance believed in surplus budgets. Remember when Senator Wong delivered her first budget as finance minister, when she told us in 2011 that the return to surplus by 2012-13 was 'not negotiable'. Remember that? She said also in her first budget there would be three years of black ink from 2012-13 onwards. In her second budget she did even better: she said the government had delivered a budget surplus and the surpluses would grow year after year. And, of course, everybody knows that what we inherited was $191 billion in accumulated deficits from Labor's first five budgets, another $123 billion in projected deficits from Labor's last budget, government debt heading for $667 billion within the decade and rising beyond that, government having to spend $1 billion a month in interest— (Time expired)