Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

something that those opposite, I'm not surprised, can't recognised.

But the other thing that we've been doing, whilst we've been putting downward pressure on inflation, whilst it's continuing to moderate, is making sure that people aren't left behind in that process, that we don't just let it rip with $315 billion of cuts, which is what those opposite are suggesting. So we make no apologies for the fact that we came into this parliament at the beginning of this year and we changed the Liberals tax cuts for high-income earners into Labor's tax cuts for every working Australian, all 13.6 million of them, because we want to make sure that people earn more and keep more of what they earn. We make no apologies, either, for coming in here and increasing the wages of aged-care workers, and later this week we'll have legislation to increase the wage for early educators as well. It's these sorts of measures that have seen the gender pay gap reduced to the lowest level in our history, which is something that we are very proud of.

We want to get real wages growing again. They've been up in the last three consecutive quarters. We make no apologies, either, for making sure that our policies have led to the fact that almost one million jobs have been created on our watch. But we're not just dealing with the immediate pressures by providing that cost-of-living support—all of which has been opposed by those opposite. We're also setting up Australia's future, through the Future Made in Australia agenda and by not being frightened of the future but trying to shape it in the interests of working people so that we not only create the jobs through the shift that's happening in the global economy—through things like production tax credits in critical minerals—but also make sure that we train people for those jobs, through our universities accord and fee-free TAFE.

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