Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Kingsford Smith has asked a range of questions, and he genuinely asked the question: how did we get back to budget surplus early? He completely lost me when he then started to talk about how we need to be less like the Howard government and, presumably, more like the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government and their wonderful budget management. He lost me at that point.

I can tell the member for Kingsford Smith how you get back to budget surplus early. You take decisions that are prudent, that are in the interests of our economy, that seek to grow the economy and that seek to ensure that businesses and individuals invest more and can take on those extra hours, and that is exactly what this budget has done. So, no, to the member for Kingsford Smith. We don't want to be more like the budget management of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years and, contrary to his advice of not trying to emulate the Howard government, like the Howard government we are committed to ensuring we get our budget back into surplus. We've done it early, or we are in the process of doing it early, and now we have to tackle the massive debt trap that Labor has left behind. We're going to do that assiduously. We're going to do that because the Australian people are entrepreneurial and, dare I say, aspirational, and they are the people who in the end are going to fuel the investment and the work to ensure that the prosperity is available for our country to ensure that the government can again live within our means within the context of providing all of the services that Australians rightly expect from government. And you can only do that with a strong economy where those people, those individuals and those businesses are supported.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Sitting suspended from 13:31 to 16:00

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