Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

It was a carbon tax that the Labor Party said they would never introduce when they went to an election. They then did exactly the opposite thing, and it took this government to abolish that carbon tax.

But what do we learn now? The Leader of the Opposition wants to bring the carbon tax back in the form of his reckless emission targets that will put up the price of everything. Under the leadership of the Deputy Prime Minister, we are building the infrastructure of the 21st century, managing our population growth into the future, and ensuring that our rural centres are connected with our major centres and that people can get home sooner and safer through our congestion-busting fund.

On Tuesday night, for the first time in 12 years, we were able to bring the budget back into a surplus, back in the black. Labor is still in the red. That's what we're seeing, and that's what you'll see tonight. Our budget is back into the black. The last time the Labor Party saw a budget surplus, as we know, was in 1989. The Leader of the Opposition—I don't know what his hairstyle was like back then, but he was running around, I know, at those Labor vanguard conferences at the time, whipping it up with his friends at parties and goodness knows what. That was the last time that we saw a budget surplus delivered by the Labor Party. But under this government that surplus has been achieved, the boats have been stopped, the carbon tax has been abolished and we're building the infrastructure of the 21st century.

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