Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Congratulations, Speaker, on your election and thank you to my colleague for the first question to me of this new parliament. Australians are paying a really hefty price for a decade of messed-up priorities and missed opportunities. The denial and the delay and the division hasn't been accidental; it's been deliberate from those opposite, and Australians right around the country are paying a hefty price for their economic failures. What it means is that Australians are more vulnerable now than they should be to the sort of economic turbulence that we are seeing around the world and here at home as well.

If you think about the global forecasts released by the International Monetary Fund overnight, they show that the global economy is heading down a precarious and perilous path. They have substantially downgraded their expectations for global growth. So the challenges facing the global economy are substantial, they are growing, they will be with us for some time, and they will be impacting on us here at home. The starkest evidence of that so far is the news that we got this morning about the June quarter inflation figure, the CPI, which was 6.1 per cent, the highest for some decades. What's been obvious for some time now is that we have in our economy high and rising inflation and falling real wages, and our ability to deal with some of these challenges is constrained by a budget which is absolutely heaving with a trillion dollars in Liberal debt, which we have inherited.

What those opposite have done—the member for Hume was front and centre in all of this—is bequeathed to a new government an energy crisis, a skills crisis and a cost-of-living crises. We didn't make this mess, but we take responsibility for cleaning it up. Our plan is all about making child care cheaper, making medicines cheaper and getting real wages growing again in this country, starting with the minimum wage. After a decade of stagnation, which hasn't been accidental—it's been deliberately imposed on the working people of this country by those opposite time and time again—we are seeing the consequences.

I think that what those opposite underestimate about the Australian people is that there is an appetite in the Australian community for some real talk about our economic challenges. There is a hunger, after a decade of division, for Australians to come together and meet these economic challenges, and there is an understanding that a mess that it took you lot nine years to make will take longer than nine weeks for us to clean up.

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