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

Once again, I appreciate the question from the member for Fowler and thank her for the conversations we've had about cost of living in the past. We do recognise and we do understand that when inflation is high and rising for longer than we would like then Australian families and Australians more broadly are under more pressure than we would like. When it comes to the low and middle income tax offset, it was a decision taken by our predecessors to end the LMITO, and that has ended. That's a decision that my predecessor, former Treasurer Frydenberg, made very clear.

What we have tried to do in the budget and what we have done in the budget is to provide cost-of-living relief to your constituents and to all our constituents in a way that doesn't add to inflation in our economy. We recognise that the reason real wages are going backwards is that inflation has been too high for too long. We recognise that interest rates are going up because inflation is higher than we want it to be, and that is largely a consequence of pressures coming from around the world, but it's felt around the kitchen tables of our communities. So, the cost-of-living relief that we are providing in the budget—whether it be cheaper early childhood education, whether it be the expansion of paid parental leave, whether it be the housing accord to get more, cheaper rental properties into the market, whether it be cheaper medicines or whether it be our policies to get wages moving again—are all about providing the cost-of-living relief that people need and deserve in a way that isn't counterproductive by making the inflation problem even worse. That's the government's strategy here. The alternative would be to risk making the inflation problem worse. But there is something like $7½ billion of cost-of-living relief flowing in the budget. As we go through these challenging times, if there's more that we can responsibly do then obviously we will consider it, and we'll always try to do the right thing by the member's constituents and by all the people we represent in this place.

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