Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for McPherson for the question. I acknowledge her service to this House. As a minister in the former government and as someone who has announced her retirement, I sincerely wish her very well in her future. I do that publicly, as I have privately.

To the member: what we have done is put together a responsible budget—a budget that delivers $14.6 billion of cost-of-living relief, assisting people who need that support with modest increases in JobSeeker and rental assistance, and by the changes we have made in parenting payments that will make a difference to the lives of people who are doing it tough. But we've also done measures, such as our Energy Price Relief Plan. When determining that in partnership with the states and territories, instead of doing a cash splash and handing out cheques—as has occurred at various times in the past—what we did was come up with a design that deliberately put downward pressure on inflation. That's why Treasury have found that that measure, together with the gas and coal caps, will reduce inflation by three-quarters of a per cent. So we were responsible. And our fee-free TAFE will mean relief, whilst addressing the supply chain constraints that have been identified by the Reserve Bank governor as the major cause, along with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, of the inflationary pressures in our economy and also in the global economy. So we have put together a budget that is responsible.

But we didn't just have expenditure in the budget, we had savings as well. Across this budget and the last budget we had $40 billion of savings. That was hard work at the Expenditure Review Committee, to go through it line by line to make sure that we were delivering for the Australian people. That's the context of the changes that we made, on top of us putting 87 per cent, across the two budgets, of any revenue gains towards the bottom line. That means lower debt repayments in the future, which is so important. It contrasts with the last budget of the former government, who splashed money everywhere. It all ended just as soon as the election was over. But we've dealt with that. We didn't create the mess, but we're fixing it. (Time expired)

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