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

It may be embarrassing for those opposite to hear this: they want to talk about their record in government, but on the record we have inherited, the budget we have inherited, the truth is that the choices we make as a new government are constrained by the fact that we have inherited a trillion dollars of debt with almost nothing to show for it. The reason for that is the shadow Treasurer and all the colleagues arraigned before us on the shadow front bench, the dregs of the former Liberal government, have left us with these challenges—whether it's a budget chock full of rorts and waste, which the member for Hume knows more about than probably anyone else in the parliament, or the fact that we don't have enough to show for this trillion dollars in debt. Every dollar they borrowed now costs more to service in the budget. The fastest-growing area of spending in the budget is us paying the interest on the debt that they accumulated over almost a decade. Instead of all this fake indignation and railing about the circumstances that they gave to us, the best thing they could do is to do the right thing and come together as the rest of Australia is doing, as we try to fix the mess that we've inherited.

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