Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

that is left in the budget to manage. There's debt going out into the future. Whilst those opposite would like to say that this is all a result of the pandemic, the former government had doubled the debt before the pandemic hit. Let's not forget that. Their fiscal vandals had done the damage before the pandemic hit, and now we are all going to be paying the price for it—and the cost of servicing that debt is increasing and increasing rapidly.

We've seen the latest figures from the Treasurer that some of that cost of servicing debt is going to exceed programs that currently pay for the childcare subsidy, higher education—those types of programs run by the Commonwealth government. The cost of servicing debt is going to exceed those. That's the situation we're in and that's why the work we're doing, Senator Babet, going through the budget line by line, is to see where sensible savings can be made so that we can reduce that debt over time.

It is one of the key challenges facing us as we work through the Expenditure Review Committee to make sure that we can deal with some of those challenges over time, and servicing debt and managing the debt is a really important part of strong, responsible budget management.