Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

Well, that's a political point that you choose to make. We do not accept that, and the national accounts do not reflect that. So let's be clear about that. The government has managed the budget responsibly and has made sensible investments where they are needed across the economy, in stark contrast to the way you managed the budget when you were in government—which is that you didn't fund things in an ongoing sense to try to make it look better, knowing that those costs were coming, so you couldn't believe the set of numbers that you released, and we saw that.

We're fixing the budget. We're making sensible investments. We're finding savings, when you found none. We're paying down debt. We're paying less interest on that debt, because debt is $176 billion lower than it was under your forecasts. And we're doing all of that at the same time that we are seeing the strongest economic growth in three years.