Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When this government was elected 12 months and one day ago, Labor member for Bennelong, we inherited a trillion dollars of Liberal debt. What we didn't inherit were the mugs that had gone with the claim of surplus that we never saw come to fruition. I think that's a decent place to start as we drill our way through the challenges of financial literacy in our society. It's where a former government essentially preyed upon some of the gap of knowledge in our community in order to serve their political purposes at the expense of increasing understanding and, indeed, having a robust and honest debate about our country's financial position. In fact, the now opposition spent nine years in government running financial capability surveys, but, when it came to improving financial literacy through education pursuits and consumer protection efforts, they left Australians to fend for themselves.

The Albanese government has taken a totally different approach to this in many ways. I note we have delivered our first full-financial-year budget. The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, did so a week and a half ago. It was our first full-financial-year budget and it had the first surplus in 15 years.

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