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

I am delighted that the member for Hume has asked me to make comparisons with previous governments, because when we came to office inflation was much higher and was rising, and now it's much lower. It's falling on our watch, and that's not by accident; it's because our policies are helping in the fight against inflation, a point that the Reserve Bank governor herself has made. When it comes to the two surpluses that we delivered, we turned two big Liberal deficits into two substantial Labor surpluses, and that's helping in the fight against inflation.

If he wants to compare this government to previous governments, then he should fess up that, when this government came to office, real wages were falling by 3.4 per cent and that now they're growing again. He should fess up and say that, when they left office, they left behind a trillion dollars in Liberal debt and nowhere near enough to show for it. While he's at it, he should fess up to all of the other comparisons that show that we are making welcome and encouraging progress in the fight against inflation and in cleaning up the mess that we inherited from those opposite.

He mentioned the RBA's forecast for inflation before and said that inflation won't get back to the midpoint of the target band for a couple of years. If he were to look at the forecasts that were released yesterday, he'd see that the Reserve Bank has inflation returning to the midpoint of the target band in June—not in two years but in June. If he were honest, he would say that what he's doing, once again, is deliberately trying to confuse people. He's trying to confuse the underlying measure and the headline measure. The Reserve Bank target is the headline measure, and they say in their new forecast that they'll hit the midpoint of the target band on the headline measure in June 2025. In their estimation, it'll be 2.6 by the end of this year.

It's really good of him, it's actually quite kind and quite generous and quite gracious of him, to ask us about the RBA forecasts, because, if he were accurate about it, he would tell the House and the people who might be watching at home that, right across the board, the Reserve Bank actually lowered their forecast for inflation yesterday. In the new forecast that they released yesterday, they lowered their forecast for inflation this year from three to 2.6. In June, they lowered their forecast for inflation from 2.8 to 2.5. If he wanted to talk about underlying inflation, if he wanted to be accurate, he would also fess up and say they downgraded their forecasts for underlying inflation as well.

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