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

Thank you to the member for Spence. He's asked more questions of me today than the shadow Treasurer has asked me in more than six months! The member for Spence is an absolute champion for every single one of the 74,000 taxpayers in his electorate who will get a tax cut from 1 July, including the 91 per cent of taxpayers in Spence who will get a bigger tax cut to help them deal with the cost-of-living pressures that they confront. I congratulate the member for Spence for being a champion of the working people of his community.

I was proud to introduce the legislation today, because our legislation means a tax cut for every taxpayer, and a bigger tax cut for more workers, to help with the cost of living. Our tax cuts are better for middle Australia, better for women and young people, better for teachers and truckies and nurses, better for police officers, and better for the economy.

This is all about relief and reform—more relief for middle Australia and a better reform for our economy. It's a better way to return bracket creep—better for labour supply and work incentives, better for women and better for young people, with no extra pressure on the budget and no additional pressure on inflation, which is moderating in welcome ways in our economy.

We didn't take this decision lightly—to change our position on stage 3. We knew it would be contentious and we knew it would be contested.

I want to pay tribute here to the Prime Minister of our country for the way that he leads our cabinet and our country and, most importantly, for the way that he delivers for middle Australia, for the way that he puts people before politics—an approach which is absolutely foreign to those opposite. This is all about giving people help with the cost of living, and the opposition don't like our changes because they would prefer wages to be lower and inflation to be higher, and they want tax cuts to be skewed to the highest incomes. Their position has been indefensible, unintelligible, incoherent and unsustainable, and we saw that again.

Let me give you two examples of the approach we're rejecting. On the same day, the shadow Treasurer called my changes 'Marxism', and by the afternoon he was on 2GB saying he might vote for them. The opposition leader called for an election on a policy that he is now voting for. That would be a pretty strange election and a pretty strange debate. Imagine how angry he would get if this was about something he's voting against? The only clarity we get is from the member for Farrer. She was asked, 'Will they roll back our changes?', and she said, 'That is absolutely our position.' No matter what they say today, they are still out of touch, they still want to roll it back and they still have no alternatives.

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