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

Thank you to the member for Hume for his question. As the Prime Minister indicated in his answer a moment ago, you have to be very careful about the facts that the shadow Treasurer puts in his questions. The reason why I'm so grateful to the Prime Minister for letting me answer this question is because it gives me an opportunity to correct some of the facts that the shadow Treasurer has been peddling in the last half an hour or so.

On the first one: if he wants to talk about homegrown inflation then homegrown inflation is nontradeable, and non-tradeable inflation is lower under us than it was under them. And the same is true of headline inflation. Inflation when we came to office, as the Prime Minister rightly said, was 6.1 per cent. Now it is four per cent in the monthly indicator—and that's too high, we're upfront about that. That is too high, but it is much lower than the inflation that we inherited from those opposite.

This answer also gives me the opportunity to point out to the shadow Treasurer that he has now said twice today something which is factually wrong about international comparisons of inflation, and I thought that I would take this opportunity to correct the shadow Treasurer—

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