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

If they really cared about cost-of-living pressures in our community, they'd support our efforts to get wages moving. If they really cared about cost-of-living pressures in our communities, they'd support our efforts to clean up the mess that they made of the budget.

When we came to office, there was a deficit of $78 billion. By the end of our first year in office that had become a $22 billion surplus. That $100 billion turnaround is the biggest nominal turnaround in the budget in the history of the Commonwealth. It shows that when we came to office, when the shadow Treasurer was busily trying to hide price rises in the economy and the electricity market—as the energy minister said a moment ago—when he was one of the worst performing ministers in one of the worst governments since Federation, he handed to us, and they handed to us, real wages going backwards, inflation absolutely galloping. There was debt and deficit as far as the eye can see. We were paying far too much to service the debt that they left behind—the trillion dollars of Liberal debt.

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