Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Vice-President of the Executive Council) Share this | Hansard source

The 2014-15 budget helped ensure that we went into this crisis from a position of comparative fiscal strength. If we hadn't made the hard decisions over six years to fix the mess that you guys left behind, we would have been in a weaker position to deal with this crisis. The Australian people know that it is thanks to the work of our government over the last six years repairing the budget, repairing the absolute mess that you left behind, that we were in a position to provide support to the economy, to provide support to business, to provide support to those Australians who are working for a business that is struggling through this period and, indeed, to provide unprecedented support to those Australians who lost their job. I can't believe that the Labor Party tactics committee in the Senate would be so brazen as to ask such a question—what chutzpah!—when clearly it is now proven how important it was that we did the hard yards fixing the fiscal mess that you guys left behind.