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

Thanks to the member for Spence. Because of his work, 74,000 people in his electorate will get a tax cut, and about the same will get energy bill relief as well. Our responsible economic management is all about fighting inflation and repairing the budget and paying down Liberal debt, not as an end in itself but to make room for our priorities: Medicare, cost-of-living help, skills and education, and housing. We saw all that in the budget.

The budget also showed that our government has helped engineer a stunning turnaround in the nation's finances in our first two years. We have turned two big Liberal deficits into two Labor surpluses. Last year, we turned a projected $78 billion Liberal deficit into a $22 billion Labor surplus. This year, we're turning a $57 billion Liberal deficit into a $9 billion Labor surplus—a $165-ish billion turnaround in two years and $215 billion overall. Debt this year is $150 billion lower because of our efforts and $185 billion next year because of our efforts. We're saving $80 billion in debt interest over the course of the next decade, and gross debt will peak much lower because of our responsible economic management.

We found the savings; we've shown the spending restraint. All of that would be foreign to those opposite. When we came to office, there were debt and deficit as far as the eye could see. There was more than a trillion dollars in Liberal debt in a budget which was heaving with rorts and waste that we have been cleaning up. They had nine cracks at a surplus and couldn't deliver a single one.

Last week, as the member for Hume was humiliating himself at the National Press Club, he was talking about fiscal guardrails and tax-to-GDP caps. He forgot to mention that the highest-taxing government of the last 30 years was the Howard-Costello government or that average real spending growth on our watch is a fraction of what it was on their watch. When he talks about $300 billion in overspending—get this—that includes the indexation of the age pension, the indexation of pensions that go to veterans, the indexation of pensions and payments that people rely on.

No wonder they didn't come clean in their budget reply about the attacks that would come to Medicare and pensions and payments and all the rubbish we saw with robodebt last time when they came to office. Last time they went after Medicare and they went after people on payments, and that's why they won't come clean on how they'll pay for their tax cuts for people on the highest incomes. Theirs was the most shambolic response to a budget in memory. It was a bin fire of incompetence and incoherence, chaos and confusion. We are the party of responsible economic management, and we won't be taking lectures from those opposite, who made the mess that we are now cleaning up. (Time expired)

See this speech in context