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

If he's angry at inflation with a three in front of it, he must have been absolutely filthy about the six per cent that they left us with. When we came to office, inflation had a six in front of it. Now it's got a three in front of it, it's still too high. We acknowledge that it's still too high with a three in front of it, but it's almost half what we inherited from those opposite, and I think that more than anything explains why the shadow Treasurer hardly ever gets any questions. The truth is that when we came to office there were bigger deficits, there was more than a trillion dollars in Liberal debt. We were paying too much in interest on the debt. We had almost nothing to show for all the waste and rorts for which the shadow Treasurer was the poster child in the former government. So we have spent two years cleaning up the mess that we inherited from the—

See this speech in context