Budget 2017: blame Senate for ‘spending’ budget, says Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott believes the budget is “the best that the government can do” under current circumstances.

Tony Abbott said the budget reinforced his longstanding calls for budget reform. Picture: Kym Smith

Tony Abbott has blamed the Senate for the fact the budget is a “spending”, rather than a “savings” budget, backing the Coalition’s banking levy as a necessary measure and the budget as “the best that the government can do” under current circumstances.

The former Prime Minister, who is in Jordan en route to Israel where he will receive an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University later this week, said John Howard was right in saying that all budgets are political.

“You can’t avoid a budget of politics, but you also want a budget to be a budget of good economics,” Mr Abbott told 2GB.

“As people like (Finance Minister) Mathias Cormann have been saying, we would have liked to have had a savings budget.

“The Senate doesn’t like savings budgets as they showed in 2014, so instead we’ve got a taxing budget, but this is the best that the government can do in these circumstances, because if we didn’t have some extra taxes, we would be blowing out the deficit, we would be saddling future generations with yet more debt and deficit and that’s a form of intergenerational theft, and that’s why it’s important that we do what we can to get the budget back in to surplus as reasonably quickly as we can.”

Mr Abbott said the budget reinforced his longstanding calls for budget reform.

“The Senate will always vote for more spending, for more regulating and for more taxes on the so-called rich when in fact it’s the opposite that we want,” he said.

“Back in 2003, showing a lot of foresight, John Howard understood that the Senate was a big problem, and he proposed this change to Section 57 of the Constitution so that if the Senate rejected a bill twice, three months apart, you would be able to go to a joint sitting of the parliament without a double dissolution election.

“This was a very good idea then, it’s an absolutely necessary idea now, and that’s why I’m going to keep talking about it, because if we’re fair dinkum about having strong government in this country, we’ve got to allow governments to get their legislation through the parliament, and that doesn’t just mean the House of Reps, it means the Senate too.”

Responding to today’s Newspoll, which shows Labor ahead 53-47 two-party preferred, Mr Abbott said good polls would follow good policy.

“They don’t always follow quickly. Sometimes they don’t really follow until polling day, but nevertheless you cannot govern in accordance with the polls,” he said.

“Frankly the only way to govern is with both eyes fairly and squarely on the long term national interest.

Mr Abbott backed the banking levy, saying that if the government needs more revenue, “it’s got to come from somewhere”.

“Now ideally you wouldn’t need more revenue because you’d be making savings.

“That’s what you’d be doing, but again we get back to this problem with the Senate.

“The Senate has been completely and absolutely obstructive ever since 2013, and this is why if we want good government in this country, in the years and decades to come, this is a bullet that we just must bite.”

The former PM said the current instability in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the South China Sea showed the importance of defence spending.

“One of the good things in the budget was the continued commitment of the government to two per cent plus defence spending, because regrettably the world is getting less secure, not more, and the only sensible response is to be prepared to defend yourself and be capable of defending yourself,” he said.

“That’s what the Abbott government certainly was determined to do and I’m pleased that hasn’t changed. A few things have changed, but that hasn’t changed.”