David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Treasury forecasts—exactly. Now we have Treasury forecasts saying that there will be a surplus three years earlier, and the government are out there trumpeting that. But why are we in a situation where we have a deficit? The fact remains that this government is tackling a mess of its own making. In the light of the global financial crisis which hit the world a couple of years ago, there is no doubt that this government overreacted by putting together a massive stimulus package, or series of stimulus packages, that with the benefit of hindsight everybody would have to agree were too large, involved poor-quality spend and have gone for too long. How ridiculous it is that we heard last night that the Building the Education Revolution spending will continue into the 2012 year, four years after we had one quarter of negative growth. Can anybody in this place honestly tell me that we need to continue stimulus spending four years after the global financial crisis in order to keep us out of trouble? I think it is a pretty long bow to draw.