Senator CORMANN (Western Australia—Minister for Finance) (14:44): I thank Senator Fawcett for that question. The state of the budget was very bad. It should not really surprise us that it was very bad, because Labor governments across Australia have a history of leaving behind budgets that are in a mess. That is what happened when John Howard became Prime Minister and that is what happened when we came into government. Of course, the previous government inherited the situation of no government net debt—a $20 billion surplus, more than $50 billion in the bank. We were collecting more than $1 billion in net interest payments on the back of a positive net asset position. What did Labor do? They delivered $191 billion in deficits in their first five budgets and another $123 billion in projected deficits in their last budget. They took us on a trajectory to $667 billion of gross debt. Senator Cameron: No one believes you. Senator CORMANN: Senator Cameron says that nobody believes us. But do you know what? I suspect that even the people voting for the Labor Party know that the Labor Party do not know how to manage money. Here we are having to borrow $1 billion a month in order to just pay the interest on their debt. Do you know what $1 billion a month would pay for? It would pay for 47,719 hip replacements. It would pay for 49,371 knee replacements. And it would for 371,885 cataract surgeries. Instead, what do we have to do? We have to pay it every month. We have to borrow a billion dollars every month and spend it just on the interest on Labor's credit card bill. We could spend that money on so many better things if only we did not have all of this Labor debt to deal with. It is very important that we get the budget back under control so that in the future we can fund these important health services even better than we are now.