Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate Senator Conroy and the Labor Party on their crystal ball. I congratulate him on his capacity to know what is in tonight's budget and to so roundly condemn it before he has even seen it. But I condemn rather than congratulate Senator Conroy and the Australian Labor Party for the mess they have left, for their management over the last six years and for the reality that the circumstances we seek to address in tonight's budget are largely of the Labor Party's making as a result of their own neglect, their own mismanagement, their own waste and their own failure to deal with the challenges Australia faces not just in the next couple of years but in the next 10, 20, 30 and 40 years, well into the future. Australians voted at the last election, having heard the now Prime Minister say on no fewer than 30 occasions that, as a government, we would end the waste, we would stop the boats, we would build the roads of the 21st century and we would get the budget back on track.