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

I thank the member for his question. The first part of the answer is to make this very important point: we on this side of the House take the Charter of Budget Honesty very seriously. What we are doing is operating within the Charter of Budget Honesty and operating within a set of fiscal rules which will bring us back to surplus in 2012-13. And, of course, we did produce the Final Budget Outcome.

What the member fails to say and fails to acknowledge is the impact on government revenues of a write-down of $150 billion which was caused by the global financial crisis and the global recession. Those opposite pretend that that write-down has simply never happened. But they will not come into this House and say what they would have done if they had been in the position that we were in when revenues were written down by $150 billion. What we on this side of the House have done is put in place a set of policies to make savings over time to bring the budget back into surplus—$100 billion worth of savings in our first four years, $33 billion in our last budget—and we will need to make more savings to come back to surplus in 2012-13 because there has been a further write-down of revenues, and that is what I stated in the Final Budget Outcome.

We are absolutely determined to bring our budget back to surplus, even though there are more difficult conditions. Why are we determined to do that? Because growth is at around trend, and in those conditions it is appropriate that we give the Reserve Bank maximum opportunity and room to move when it comes to interest rates. We on this side of the House have done that. We have put in place a responsible fiscal policy and made responsible savings, and we will do that in terms of the mid-term update that will come by the end of the year.

There is a very clear contrast between that approach and the approach of those opposite, who have a $70 billion hole in their budget bottom line, and they are not going to tell anybody how they intend to fill it. On our side of the House, we are complying with the Charter of Budget Honesty, and we will continue to do that. On that side of the House, the shadow Treasurer is refusing to take the walk past Aussies to go round to the Parliamentary Budget Office—

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