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

is quite right. The state that is leading by example when it comes to living within your means as a government and when it comes to building a stronger and more prosperous economy is none other than the state government in Victoria. So, Senator Lines, I am very pleased to note that even Labor senators in this chamber have realised that the Napthine Liberal-National government has been performing strongly when it comes to providing good financial management, good fiscal management, and when it comes to taking Victoria forward, strengthening the Victorian economy.

When we came into government in September last year, we inherited a budget in a mess. The Labor Party left behind $123 billion in projected deficits, $667 billion in government gross debt within a decade and rising beyond that. They forced us to pay more than $1 billion in interest payments a month, just to service the debt that Labor had accumulated in that period. We have set out to repair the budget because we want to protect living standards for Australian families. We want to build a stronger economy. We want to create better opportunities for our children and grandchildren for the future.

We are very mindful that, particularly at this time, as we are facing global economic challenges which are impacting on our revenues, it is even more important than before that we get our spending growth trajectory under control and that we get our debt growth trajectory under control. In the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook in December last year what we set out to do was to explain the real state of the budget, using realistic budget numbers, and Labor said that we were being excessively pessimistic—that somehow the numbers were not realistic enough and we were just trying to make the numbers look bad. Well, look at this—we were actually, as it turns out, too optimistic about what Labor left behind, and none other than the Parliamentary Budget Office confirmed so yesterday.