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

Certainly, Mr Speaker. Bringing the budget back to surplus is absolutely important.

Opposition members: Withdraw!

I do withdraw. Bringing the budget back to surplus is critical. We have a commitment to bringing the budget back to surplus. But the opposition leader today walked away from that idea and scrapped his commitment to returning to surplus. We had the opposition finance spokesman do the same a couple of days ago.

What is more extraordinary is that we have found out why. Why are they walking away from that commitment to surplus? They are doing it because the shadow Treasurer said there is a $70 billion crater in their budget bottom line. It is that big. We have had some progress from the shadow Treasurer on this today. He has been running around the country insisting he never said it was $70 billion, despite the fact that it was there on Sunrise. It is there for everybody to see, but he has been running around the country saying that he never said it. Today on radio, this is what he said: 'Okay, I shouldn't have said it.' The extraordinary thing about that is he does not know that that is not the problem. The problem is: how did they get to $70 billion in the first place? How many commitments have they made that cannot be funded? The truth is that their numbers do not— (Time expired.)

See this speech in context