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

The shadow Treasurer is proof that hot air is not an economic policy. The fact is that we are bringing this budget back into the black, we are doing it by making savings, we are doing it in 2012-13 and we are doing it despite the opposition's fiscal vandalism and their refusal to support responsible savings. Fair dinkum! The shadow Treasurer was on television last night. He said on the one hand that it was too tough and on the other hand that we are not spending enough. This shadow Treasurer walks both sides of the street all the time. The fact is that we will come back to surplus because this government has done the hard yards. We have put in place the spending restraints that those opposite were not capable of exercising during their 12 years in government. We have average spending each year over the budget estimates increasing by just one per cent. When they were in power, it was increasing by 3.7 per cent. They went on a spending spree at the height of mining boom Mark I. We are doing the hard yards of bringing the budget back to surplus in 2012-13 by making $22 billion worth of savings and putting in place one of the biggest fiscal consolidations or returns to surplus that we have seen in this country.

The shadow Treasurer quotes some sensitivity analysis from the budget papers. That is not the central forecast in the budget papers and he seeks to misrepresent it. He seeks to misrepresent it for political purposes. We will come back to surplus in 2012-13, because that is the central forecast that we have from the advisers who work both with them as forecasters and with us as forecasters. We are doing it despite the fact that there have been substantial revenue write-downs. We are doing it because we have shown the strict fiscal discipline to bring our budget back to surplus, a discipline that those on that side of the House simply do not understand.

We are coming back to surplus and we are doing it in a responsible way with a very strict fiscal policy and we will do it in 2012-13. We will build surpluses after that and we will continue to apply our two per cent cap. There is a stark difference between the approach of us on this side of the House and the approach of those opposite. What they want to do in reality is to wreck the surplus. If they succeeded in wrecking the surplus, they would put price pressures into the Australian economy and all Australians would be the victims of that.

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