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

(—) (): The answer to that is no, but I welcome the opportunity again to remind those opposite about the mess we inherited from them and the seriousness that we are paying for the first time in a number of years around budget repair. We have a trillion dollars of Liberal Party debt that we are managing, that we have to manage. We have pressures coming towards the budget that are increasing, not decreasing, and we can go through them again. Aged care, Medicare, hospitals, defence—they are all areas where pressure is increasing, not decreasing. We have a $50 billion structural deficit that we inherited from you. That is what we need to repair, and that is why there is this very modest change to the concessionality of tax for high-balance accounts over $3 million. It's a sensible change. It assists with budget repair. It means that we can make room for some of those pressures that you ignored but Australians value—things like paying for aged-care workers. How about that? We are making investments in those types of areas against a background of a budget that was riddled with waste and pork-barrelling and a failure to deal with the pressures. Remember the Back in Black mugs? We all remember them. That budget was never going back into balance, because there were a range of pressures heading their way, but they also had this very nifty way of budgeting which was to budget for one year or two years for programs that were ongoing. I mean, the dishonesty in your budget when you were in government is galling, and we are fixing it. We take our responsibility seriously and we will get on with it. (Time expired)