Shorten seizes on Abbott cuts as 'cop out'

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says Tony Abbott is right to call cuts to state funding a "cop out".

Mr Shorten told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia conference in Canberra on Monday that Labor's "fundamental objection" to the budget was the $80 billion cut to school and hospital funding.

Since the Menzies government there had been bipartisan support for the federal government helping the states and territories with funding for education and health, he said.

But the Abbott government's first budget represented a "dramatic and reckless destabilising" of the federation.

Mr Shorten told the conference the prime minister had written in his book Battlelines: "Any withdrawal of commonwealth spending in these areas would rightly be seen as a cop out."

"Tonight I say Tony Abbott is right," he said.

"For the commonwealth to withdraw any spending from schools and hospitals is indeed a cop out.

"But it is more serious than this. It is an abdication of leadership."

Mr Shorten said Labor supported the need to balance the budget over the medium term.

"Labor also recognises that to be sustainable, a budget must also be fair and reasonable," he said.

"Yet this budget ... assigns the heaviest lifting to the weak, and only the lightest touch to the strong."