Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is true; it has not been achieved yet. It has not. I am talking about the forecast. Every time that forecast is mentioned, those opposite want to claim some credit by saying that something they did three or four or 10 years ago has somehow produced it. I will tell you what produced the surplus that has enabled these funds to be used: it was the May budget and the way that was crafted. That was a difficult thing to do. It was not only a difficult thing to do; it was a thing that those opposite seldom did.

My time is running out, but there is one thing that I think needs to be corrected because it comes up so often in these debates. People talk about budget surpluses without much regard for the facts. This fact usually gets overlooked, especially by those opposite. Between World War II and when the Hawke Labor government came into office in 1983, those opposite were in power throughout. It was a boom period. In that period there was not one surplus budget. The Commonwealth ran its first surplus budgets in the Hawke-Keating years. To give you an example: in 1988-89, the budget surplus was 1.8 per cent of GDP. This is what Terry McCrann said after the member for Higgins boasted about a budget surplus. He said, ‘It’s sobering to be reminded, as the budget papers do, that an earlier world champion Treasurer had—’ (Time expired)

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