Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan has insisted that the budget he presented Tuesday was forward-looking, which means the provisions embodied in the budget plan were to ensure Australia's economic competitiveness in the years and decades ahead.

The budget fundamentals were all geared for the Asian century, Mr Swan said in an interview with ABC Radio on Wednesday, stressing at the same time that "the budget is not about the next election or the opinion polls or anything like that."

His foremost concern in plotting the country's financial direction, Mr Swan said, was "getting the economic fundamentals right to maximise the prosperity which will flow to this country from the Asian century and to make this the Australian century in Asia."

The Treasurer, however, admitted that some form of sacrifices must be accepted by everyone in order for the targeted $1.5 billion surplus to be realised, one of which is the scrapping of an across-the-board corporate tax break that Prime Minister Julia Gillard has pledged to hand down with the new budget blueprint.

Mr Swan said the Labor government has not backed away from the one percentage point that Ms Gillard has previously committed to the business community but the proposal, he admitted, would not prosper in the Parliament due to the spirited opposition of the Coalition and the Australian Green Party.

In lieu of the abandoned tax cuts in the 2012-2013 budget, the Labor-led government plans to re-channel the projected savings to extra entitlements for low-income Australian households, which in effect would spread the economic benefits that the ongoing mining boom has been generating, Mr Swan said.

As planned earlier, he noted, the minerals resource rent tax (MRRT) will fund the payments, which were originally earmarked for the now axed company tax benefits.

Ms Gillard has acknowledged that the budget revisions caused resentments among the business community, which immediately expressed its anger on the so-called political manoeuvring of the Gillard government, but he assured that the tax benefit will eventually materialise.

Ms Gillard told ABC today that she plans to initiate a working plan with business leaders that hopefully would lead to some reconfiguration of the country's tax system, en route to the eventual slashing of the current 30 per cent tax collected from Australian businesses.

"I am very determined to deliver a company tax cut," the prime minister stressed as she called on Opposition leader Tony Abbott to consider the real situation before expressing his opposition on specific measures contained in the new budget.

"Mr Abbott's got to get off Sydney's north shore and go and talk to some real families and get himself in the real world," Ms Gillard said.

But Mr Abbott stressed that his take on the budget was wholly based on estimates by the Coalition that the budget presented by Mr Swan was unrealistic and it will not pave the way for a surplus but rather an increased Australian debt ceiling of about $300 billion.

"Obviously the treasurer is deeply sceptical about his own surplus because if the surplus was really there they wouldn't need to borrow more," Mr Abbott told the Australian Associated Press (AAP) today.

He added that the government should cease on making the opposition a scapegoat on its shortcomings, pointing out that if Mr Swan was indeed very serious in giving company tax cuts, he would have worked more closely with his Green allies, which shot down the proposal to extend more tax benefits to giant firms.

"If the treasurer was so committed to the particular company tax cut he should have declared it was a matter of confidence and forced his Green alliance partners to support it in the parliament," the Liberal leader argued.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey said he was critical of the budget due to questionable policies that he claimed would create more problems than solve them.

His worries, Mr Hockey said, were bolstered as he realised that Mr Swan had geared the budget too much on Australia's resources activities, which in turn hinge largely on events that were out of Australia's hands.

"This government has put everything on the mining boom ... and if there's a cough in China or Europe deteriorates, this whole budget comes down like a house of cards," the shadow treasurer warned.