Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

My expectation would be that that would remain the practice. If I believe it is about to change I will let you know, but I see no reason why it would change. I would say from the point of view of the financial markets that they have tended on the whole to rely on the underlying cash balance as the measure of the budget position, but it has become the practice to have both the underlying cash balance and the fiscal balance. I see no reason why that would change.

I thought it was interesting that the former minister almost ended up in an intellectual cul-de-sac, talking on the one hand about how we are about to blow the debt lid and on the other hand that we are softening everybody up for these major cuts. Well, I will let you into a scoop. What we are going to do is going to be quite balanced. It will balance the near-term needs of the economy at a time when the economy has been relatively soft for the reasons I mentioned earlier—with subtrend growth, with unemployment edging up—against the medium-term need to put in place the sorts of measures that Senator Wong referred to as the 'structural saves' so that, over time, we are making more and more savings. The fact of the matter is beyond the forward estimates is when the increase in some of the major spending starts to come through, whether it is the Gonski education funding or the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Contrary to what the senator said, essentially what we have been told on both those items is not that there were specific saves but there was a commitment to find offsetting savings for those proposals.