Scott Morrison has warned of a $1 trillion debt blowout in the next decade should the new parliament fail to back his budget savings measures.
The treasurer intends to put its support to the test when MPs and senators return to Canberra next week.
He will present his plan to cut the corporate tax rate in increments to 25 per cent over the next 10 years, a controversial proposal, but one Mr Morrison believes is critical for investment.
"Driving that investment on the non-mining sector of the economy is critically important to our growth going forward," Mr Morrison told a Bloomberg conference in Sydney on Thursday.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says the treasurer's warning is just another sign of the government blaming everyone else.
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And, if anyone needed reminding, it was the coalition that had increased the budget deficit and mismanaged the accounts.
"If the only plans they've got are plans, which nobody else wants to sign up to, they can keep saying that everybody else is wrong or they can have some quiet reflection and re-examine the way they're doing business," Mr Shorten told reporters in Canberra.
Crossbench senator Nick Xenophon says the government doesn't have a plan to deal with the manufacturing job losses when the auto-making sector shuts down by the end of 2017.
"We are facing a jobs cliff of up to 200,000 jobs," Senator Xenophon told reporters in Sydney.
Mr Morrison blamed an earnings problem for continued large budget deficits, having said repeatedly the budget suffered a spending problem rather than a revenue one.
Former Liberal leader John Hewson described it as "stupid semantics" because the government didn't want to be seen as potentially raising taxes.
"The bottom line is, if you put down all the expenditures measures and all the tax measures offered by both sides of politics they will probably together still be inadequate to bring about the necessary budget repair," Dr Hewson told Sky News.
The treasurer is concerned Australia's 25 years of consecutive economic growth has been steadily sowing the seeds of complacency.
A generation had grown up in an environment where receiving government payments is not seen as the preserve of the disadvantaged but a component of income over their entire life.
Mr Morrison believes there is a new divide - "the taxed and the taxed nots".
Oxfam chief executive Helen Szoke thought the comments "alarming", demonising the country's poor, when one in three large companies pay no tax.
The welfare lobby saw the comments as divisive, suggesting there was a whole lot of people relying on social security when the facts show the opposite.
"The treasurer is cooking up a recipe which will be very bad for the economy ... with an agenda which is about cutting social security potentially to the bone and at the same time delivering tax cuts at the high end," ACOSS chief Cassandra Goldie she told Sky News.
