Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Last year, around September, the previous Treasurer, the member for Higgins, made the now famous statement that inflation was right where he wanted it. That is what the former Treasurer said: inflation was right where he wanted it. This just demonstrates how you guys in government got this all wrong. And now it falls to us, the Rudd Labor government, to put in place a series of fundamental reforms to address these problems. We are absolutely determined to do that. The first step we are taking is to bring under control your reckless spending spree of the last three or four years. We saw in the last four-year period the biggest increase in federal spending of any other four-year period in the last 15 years, just at a time when the terms of trade were pumping up the economy.

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