Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Crossin for that important question. It was very disappointing today that the Senate, led by the Liberal opposition, sought and successfully deferred key budget measures. Quite frankly, this does provide a serious threat to the government’s budget strategy. As you know, during the election campaign we made commitments to the Australian public to deliver on programs such as tax cuts, childcare assistance and education tax rebates—measures designed to assist working families. The other commitment we made was to be fiscally conservative—to run an economy that allowed us to maintain downward pressure on interest rates and downward pressure on inflation. We were left a very serious inflationary problem. We have sought to tackle that in the budget by running a large surplus. As the Reserve Bank noted yesterday when its minutes were released, it will be a larger surplus than expected, and one that is successfully trying to put downward pressure on interest rates and inflation to try to assist Australian families to ensure that their income is not eaten away by inflation and to ensure that they get real benefit from the tax cuts we are going to deliver on 1 July. Those economic settings are very important to the families of Australia and they are very important to the government’s attempt to deal with the economic issues confronting us.

This morning, the coalition again abused their Senate majority. One would have thought that after the last election they would have learnt their lesson. It did cost them government. Their abuse of their Senate majority cost them government, and I think they should have learnt their lesson. In abusing their Senate majority, they committed economic vandalism. Vandalism is described as ‘wilful—