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

As I was saying, the Australian people should not have to pay the price for Mr Rudd going out and trying to stack the numbers in his quest to become the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. In this budget we have frozen the foreign aid allocation, the foreign aid budget, this year and next year at the same nominal amount. Then we are increasing it by the CPI instead of taking it up to 0.5 per cent of gross national income—as we transparently said we would do before the election and as we transparently said we would do in the budget. That is the responsible course of action given the debt and deficit disaster that we inherited from the Labor-Green government when we came into government in September. But of course, if the Greens support our agenda for stronger growth, if the Greens support our agenda to repair the budget, if the Greens support our agenda to get back into surplus, we will have more money available in order to invest in causes like foreign aid. But in the meantime, while we have to borrow a billion dollars a month just to pay the interest on Labor's debt, we just cannot afford more than what is in the budget.