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

A stronger and more prosperous economy with more and better jobs helps families across Australia to get ahead. It gives families across Australia the best possible opportunity to get ahead. Continuing the effort on budget repair is important to ensure that important government services and benefits continue to be affordable, sustainable and available over the long term. It is of course also important to ensure that we maintain our AAA credit rating. If we do not make decisions now as a parliament to improve our budget position, then ratings agencies have made it quite plain that our AAA credit rating would be at risk. Any downgrade would have flow-on consequences on the whole economy, because our AAA credit rating helps us to keep borrowing for businesses and consumers across the economy and it also helps to ensure Australia is in a much stronger position in the event of any future external economic shocks.