Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Australia does have a fundamentally strong economy, but under the former Labor government the budget was fundamentally weak. So we had a fundamentally strong economy but a fundamentally weak budget. What this government is doing is fixing the budget to strengthen our economy—and didn't it need fixing. The former government, the Labor Party, inherited a $20 billion surplus and $50 billion in the bank, and they gave the people of Australia the six biggest deficits in our history. They gave us debt and deficit stretching out as far as the eye can see—$123 billion in cumulative projected deficits and $667 billion in projected gross debt. Thanks to the policies pursued by members opposite, this country is borrowing a billion dollars every single month just to pay interest on the borrowings. Under the policies of members opposite, within a decade that mean $3 billion would have to be borrowed every single month—enough to fund the Western Sydney infrastructure package, which this government are getting on with.

You cannot keep putting the mortgage on the credit card, which is what members opposite have done. This government did not create the problem, but we are shouldering responsibility for fixing it. Under us, instead of a $30 billion deficit in 2017-18, the deficit will come in at under $3 billion and debt will be $300 billion less under the policies that we announced in the budget. This is what the government was elected to do. We were elected to take the tough decisions necessary to get this country back on track and that is exactly what we are doing. Every day before the election, we made it crystal clear what we were doing: we would stop the boats, we would scrap the carbon tax and we would build the road to the 21st century and we would get the budget back under control, and that is precisely what this government are doing.

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