PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: So I hear you went teaching yesterday at Padua.
TREASURER WAYNE SWAN: I certainly did. There's a couple of bright sparks there. They gave me a grilling.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: A hard time?
TREASURER WAYNE SWAN: Yeah, I think you'd call it that. They enjoyed it.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: What'd you get wrong, what'd you get right?
TREASURER WAYNE SWAN: [laughs]
TREASURER WAYNE SWAN: It's good to be here this morning and it's good to be here to talk with you and perhaps to answer some of your questions about what's going on in the global economy and what's happening in the Australian economy.
STUDENT: Fair enough that we have got one of the smallest debts in the advanced, like advanced economies as a percentage of GDP, but -
TREASURER WAYNE SWAN: -at its peak, not now. At its peak - 13.8 per cent at its peak compared to 80 per cent in other advanced economies.
STUDENT: What about per capita, because, I mean, we've got such a small population for an advanced economy, and not only that, we have an aging population, so the tax revenue from those people is going to go down as well, and then they're going to be going on to, even with the super, still going to be a lot people on the pension.
TREASURER WAYNE SWAN: All advanced economies have aging populations, and all advanced economies are facing that problem, so there's not great, dramatic difference across the economies, but it's a really intelligent question that you've just asked, and a critical one, and it was a question that was very much at the core of our recent Budget.
You might recall there's been a debate about the aged pension in Australia, and in our recent Budget we increased the basic rate of the aged pension by $30 a week.
Now, why did we do that? We did it because justice had to be delivered to single aged pensioners who simply could no longer live on the amount of money they were being provided, so when we took that decision in the Budget we said ‘what we have to do is to make savings elsewhere in the Budget to pay for this over time.' Otherwise we are putting an unsustainable burden on our children, on our grandchildren, and their children, so what we did is we put savings in the Budget which go out 40 years. We made changes to the private health insurance rebate, which was becoming unsustainable. We made some changes in the tax system. We made changes across a variety of areas of expenditure in the Budget, structural changes which will provide the money for the next 40 years for that pension increase.