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

We will always take the balanced decision to support jobs and growth, and that is what I talked about—at the end of last year, the impact on our budget of extreme global volatility and the fact that we lost in four months all of the revenue we had previously written down for 12 months. I went out and I said that, as a result of that, it would be unlikely that we would come to surplus. I also made the point very strongly that we are keeping in place a very substantial fiscal consolidation because we think that good, strict fiscal policy is the foundation of jobs and growth—and, by the way, also of healthy public finances, because you have to have good growth to have healthy public finances.

Of course, I know that notion of economics is rejected by those opposite, who are at war, really, with 21st-century economics, do not accept that and now are putting a proposition to the Australian people that over the last five years we should have cut expenditure by $160 billion over and above the structural saves that we made in the budget. If they had had their way, during the global financial crisis Australia would have gone into recession, and much more deeply so, because apparently their view is now that there needed to be an extra $160 billion worth of cuts to make up for the revenue write-downs. That would have pushed unemployment through the roof and tens of thousands of small businesses into bankruptcy. That is where their policy position is leading.

We as a government have always taken the tough decisions. We have been prepared to move when conditions have changed. We did that during 2008 and 2009 and put in place one of the most effective responses to the global financial crisis of any country in the developed world. The consequence of that today is an unemployment rate with a five in front of it. You look around the world, you look at other developed economies, and you see tens of millions of people unemployed, whole communities shattered. Here in Australia, yes, we do still live with the consequences of the global financial crisis, we live with the aftershocks, but we have the best set of fundamentals in the developed world and we are proud of it.

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