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

We do more than acknowledge, as he did in his question, that people are doing it tough. We are acting on it. We're helping with the cost of living, and we're getting wages moving again and we're getting real wages moving again as a consequence of our efforts.

If the commentary that the shadow Treasurer read out is true now, imagine how much worse it would be if we were still running the huge deficits that we inherited from those opposite. They were running massive deficits when we came to office, and we turned two of those huge deficits into two substantial surpluses. The Reserve Bank governor has made it really clear that those surpluses are helping in the fight against inflation. When we came to office, the most recent budget from those opposite had zero savings in it. We found almost $80 billion in savings, and we put that in our three budgets.

When those opposite were spending almost all of the upward revision to revenue from a stronger labour market and stronger commodity prices, we banked almost all of it. We did that deliberately. That's been an important part of our fiscal strategy which has helped us clean up a lot of the mess that we inherited from those opposite. And because of our efforts, we're saving tens of billions of dollars in interest repayments, which is also helping the budget and making room for us to provide cost-of-living help and invest in housing, energy and skills and in a future made in Australia, and those are important objectives.

When I'm asked about government spending, we're in the third year, now, of a three-year parliamentary term. It is long past time. If those opposite think there is $315 billion too much spending in the budget then it's incumbent on them to come clean on their cuts and to tell us where those cuts will come from. He asked me about government spending. I'm allowed to talk about the implications—

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