Mathias Cormann has just admitted that his failure to take cuts out of the Budget that are unlikely to pass the Parliament makes no sense.

If his words are to have any meaning he must now respond to Labor’s calls and remove billions of dollars in cruel zombie cuts from his own Budget.

Speaking about the Liberals’ humiliating backflip on the Medicare Levy, the Finance Minister today said:

"I mean, what do people expect us to do? Just to keep it on the books without any prospects to actually collect the money in practice? I mean, that just doesn't make sense."

(Mathias Cormann, Sky News AM Agenda, 27 April 2018)

No Mathias, it doesn’t.

Now the Finance Minister has made his views clear on measures that have no hope of passing the Parliament, he should do the right thing by pensioners in the Budget and drop the Liberals’ unfair zombie cuts once and for all. These include:

• Increasing the pension age to 70 - meaning Australia will have an older pension age than the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand;
• Axing the Energy Supplement to two million Australians – including 400,000 age pensioners;
• Taking away the pension supplement from pensioners who go overseas for more than six weeks; and
• Making migrants wait up to 15 years before they can access the age pension.

As long as Cormann, Turnbull and Morrison cling to these fake savings, their Budget is nothing more than a fiscal fairy tale that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.