Prime Minister Tony Abbott has used a tribute to the late Lee Kwan Yew to indicate his government’s reform ambitions are not complete.

Mr Abbott said that thanks to the reforms of Singapore’s first prime minister the island state’s GDP per head of population was almost double that of Australia.

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He recalled Lee’s warning 30 years ago that Australia risked becoming “the poor white trash of Asia”, which struck a chord in Canberra and prompted a quarter century of reform under the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments.

“But if we are to avoid his prophecy, the challenge for this generation is to ensure that the age of reform in this country has been merely interrupted not ended,” Mr Abbott told parliament on Tuesday.

Business groups had taken Mr Abbott’s recent prediction of a “dull” budget on May 12 as a sign that the government had gone soft on reform.