Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Fawcett for that question. The state of the budget was very bad. It should not really surprise us that it was very bad, because Labor governments across Australia have a history of leaving behind budgets that are in a mess. That is what happened when John Howard became Prime Minister and that is what happened when we came into government. Of course, the previous government inherited the situation of no government net debt—a $20 billion surplus, more than $50 billion in the bank. We were collecting more than $1 billion in net interest payments on the back of a positive net asset position. What did Labor do? They delivered $191 billion in deficits in their first five budgets and another $123 billion in projected deficits in their last budget. They took us on a trajectory to $667 billion of gross debt.