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

I thank the member for Capricornia for this question, because I think the government understands just how difficult the international economic environment is and you can see that in terms of the pictures that are coming out of Greece as I speak. But the fact is progress does need to be made in Europe and that progress needs to be made despite the fact that whatever happens there will be a very long and painful adjustment in that community. We do feel the impact of these global events particularly in Europe on our own economy and on our budget and we were upfront about that in our mid-year budget update. But here fortunately our economy is seven per cent larger than it was prior to the global financial crisis, because the government acted decisively to support jobs and growth. And, of course, we have seen something like 700,000 jobs created in this country since the government came to power. If those opposite had had their way, Australia would have gone into recession and we would have seen hundreds of thousands of Australians who were unemployed and we would have seen tens of thousands of small businesses hit the wall.

But our economic fundamentals here are strong. We have got solid growth, we have got low unemployment, we have got contained inflation, we have got strong public finances and we have got a record pipeline of investment. But our revenues have been hit by these events in Europe and around the world. We have lost something like $140 billion, ripped from government revenues because of global instability. And that would have happened to those opposite had they been in power during this period. And, of course, the budget went into deficit. If they had been here, because of their failure to act they would have seen even bigger deficits. But, given that our economy is now growing at trend, we are absolutely determined to bring our budget back to surplus in 2012-13. We are determined to bring it back and that we deliver it. We have seen over the past week or so the slapstick farce of those opposite as they have, one-by-one, walked away from their commitment to bring the budget back to surplus—

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