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

Well, Mr Speaker, they've got a lot of nerve asking about incomes, having opposed all of our efforts to get incomes moving again in this country, after they presided over a decade of deliberate wage stagnation and wage suppression. We know this because former minister Mathias Cormann said the quiet bit out loud. He said that stagnant wages were a deliberate design feature of their economic policy architecture.

We take a different view when it comes to incomes. Our view is that we needed to get wages moving again in our economy, and we are pleased to see that that's happening, because this side of the House is all about Australians earning more and keeping more of what they earn. That's what we're on about. That side of the House is all about screwing people down. It's all about blaming working people and the most vulnerable for our inflation challenge in our economy. It's all about screwing people down and denying them the tax cuts that they need and deserve to get by at a difficult time. Their approach is all about denying people a bit of help with their electricity bills. Their approach is about denying people a bit of help with early childhood education fees. It's about denying people cheaper medicines and it's about denying people the wages growth that has been missing for too long in our economy.

If they want to ask about the national accounts they should be upfront and say that if we had taken their advice Australia's economy would be in recession right now and people would be doing it even tougher. I invite those opposite and I invite the public beyond to think about the consequences of their $315 billion in secret cuts and what they would mean for incomes, what they would mean for living standards and what they would mean for an economy which is already barely growing. Their time would be better spent explaining to the Australian people what those $315 billion in cuts are, what they mean for Medicare, what they mean for pensions and payments and what they mean for an economy that we know has growth which is soft and subdued.

What we have done in the little over two years that we've been in office—having inherited much higher and rising inflation, having inherited deficits as far as the eye can see, having inherited real wages falling substantially—is work diligently and collectively to try and turn things around, because we know, and as the Prime Minister said, what really matters in the economy is how people are faring. They would be doing it much tougher if those opposite had had their way when it comes to wages and when it comes to cost-of-living relief. So those opposite do have a lot of nerve asking about living standards when they spend most of their time trying to deny people the decent wages and the cost-of-living relief that they need and deserve at a time when they're under pressure and when growth in the economy is soft and subdued.

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