Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The conservative government of Japan is running a deficit of 3.9 per cent of GDP. These are the facts about what is happening around the world as individual governments seek to respond to a global financial crisis—facts which those opposite find personally confronting because they are politically inconvenient. These are the inconvenient truths.

Secondly, when it comes to revenues those opposite need to accept the reality that $40 billion has been sliced off the government’s revenues across the forward estimates because of the global financial crisis. That has happened right across the developed world. Thirdly, on the question of outlays, what did this government do in its preparation for the last budget? Through the activity of the Minister for Finance and Deregulation and through the Expenditure Review Committee, it sliced $5 billion worth of excessive expenditures by way of a savings program which the Treasurer delivered in the context of the budget and which he announced in May of this year—$5 billion. On top of that, that has given us the capacity to bring in the stimulus package that we announced in October of $10.4 billion and, in addition to that, to make forward provision for the auto plan of $6.2 billion and to make forward provision for various other stimulus packages which I have already announced.

I would say this to those opposite, as they seek to provide a lecture on the question of fiscal probity: have those opposite bothered to cost those promises which they have stuck out there in the public domain—on ready-to-mix drinks, luxury car tax, crude oil excise condensate? Whatever the position may now be—

See this speech in context