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

Labor never want to hear this. There were two big spending boosts under Labor. One was the 17 per cent increase above inflation in the context of the global financial crisis, which was supposed to be crisis level spending which Labor locked in as the new base. Then, as they were staring down the barrel of losing the election, in they came and they legislated all these massive increases in expenditure on the NDIS—a very important initiative, of course, but without fully funding it—on Gonski and on a whole range of other things. Labor locked spending growth into legislation without properly funding it.

The government are dealing with the unsustainable spending growth trajectory that you left behind. Is government spending in Australia too high? You bet it is. Do we need to keep working on bringing it down as a share of the economy? Absolutely. Of course there are two ways of doing it. Increasing the economy and strengthening growth will, of course, help bring down spending as a share of the economy, and so will making sure that spending is on a more sustainable foundation for the future. We are doing it.

When we came into government we inherited spending growth of about 3.7 per cent above inflation, on average, per annum. As a result of the efforts of this government over the past two years we have been able to bring that down to about 1.5 per cent above inflation, on average. Is there more work to be done? Of course there is more work to be done. Would we like to have made more progress by now? Yes, we would have. Have we faced some additional challenges, including in the Senate? Yes, we have. We are doing the best we can and we are in a much better position than we would have been if the worst finance minister in the history of Australia was still in office.