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

I said that the current economic conditions justify the position we've taken in the budget, and I stand by that. I gave a detailed answer a moment ago about why that's the case, and I'm happy to repeat the main points that I made earlier: that is, if we'd followed the advice of those opposite—hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts—it would have been diabolical for the conditions people are confronting right now, with a soft economy and people who are under pressure.

I'll tell you what, I won't be taking lectures from the people who left us more than $1 trillion of Liberal debt and almost nothing to show for it. And I won't be taking lectures from the poster child of waste and rorts in the budget that we were left to clean up. I won't be taking lectures from those opposite, who left us inflation with '6' in front of it, and it now has a '3' in front of it.

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