Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am a bit confused, because I do not think the opposition know where they are heading with this budget. They do not particularly want to talk about last month's budget, they want to talk about last year's budget. That is fine, if they want to do that, because we absolutely recognise and stand behind the fact that we did need to make tough decisions last year. We did need to make some difficult and necessary choices for the Australian people because the path we were on was completely unsustainable. Those decisions were made.

They want to talk about last year's budget because that is in their political interest. There were very few questions today in question time about last night's budget, because last night's budget builds on those tough decisions we made last year and allows the Australian people to start reaping the dividends of those tough choices. You are never able to deliver success in life before you do hard work. The only place in the world where success comes before work is in the dictionary. We had to do the hard work last year before we delivered success to the Australian people.

I am confident that last night's budget will build confidence in our economy, particularly among small businesses and farmers. They will then have the confidence to invest and create the jobs and opportunity that only they can create. We cannot do that here, unfortunately. As much power as we think we have, we cannot wave a magic wand and make people have a job and opportunity. We must rely on the individual enterprise of all Australians to bring that about. Last night's budget will help achieve that.

Last night's budget enshrines the fact that taxes will be lower under a coalition government, and that will create more opportunity and confidence in our business sector. Under the previous government revenue as a percentage of GDP was escalating, going through the roof. You will not hear them talk about it. What you need to look at is not the Labor Party's last budget but the pre-election forecasts done by Treasury and Finance. When you look at the independent numbers that were done before the election, our revenue to GDP was going through the roof, because they came to government when our taxes or revenue to GDP were just 23.3 per cent of GDP. By the election, it had escalated or had gone down and then back up. Under the pre-election forecasts our taxes to GDP were going to raise to 23.9 per cent of GDP, then to 24.6 per cent of GDP and then finally, in the last year of those forward estimates, 2015-16, to 24.8 per cent of GDP.

Every one of those numbers is now lower. In that final year, the revenue to GDP was 24.2 per cent of GDP, then 24 the previous year and then 23.5.