Treasurer Wayne Swan said Tuesday he wanted to make Australia a financial services hub for the Asia Pacific region, as he delivered the centre-left Labor government's first budget. Swan announced that a tax levied on overseas investors would be slashed in a bid to make Australian managed trusts more attractive to international investors. Swan said the withholding tax imposed on payouts made by Australian trusts to overseas residents would be slashed from 30 percent to 7.5 percent over the next three years. Swan said the move would "provide a significant boost to Australia's ability to compete globally". "The arrangements will ensure Australian property trusts -- which will be primarily affected by the new arrangements -- are well placed to attract future foreign investment now and into the future," he said. He said Australia was internationally recognised as one of the major markets for managed funds -- with more than A$1.4 trillion dollars in assets -- but only 3 percent of fees came from overseas investors. The treasurer said industry had advised that this was because Australia's witholding tax rate was among the highest in the world, a situation the government had now moved to rectify. In other budget news, he handed out huge tax breaks to low and middle-income earners and announced big spending on health, education and climate change. Unveiling A$47 billion dollars ($44.2 billion ) in personal income tax cuts over the next four years, Swan said the budget encapsulated core Labor values. He said it was time that "working families", the key demographic in Labor's election win last November, saw the benefits of the resources boom that has filled the government's coffers in recent years. Swan also stressed the economic conservatism of the first budget handed down by a Labor government for 13 years, predicting a surplus of A$21.7 billion dollars, or 1.8 percent of gross domestic product, in 2008/09. The Australian government also announced an initiative to boost its skilled migrant intake 30 percent to record levels in a bid to overcome a shortage of skilled workers, the government said Tuesday.