Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Acting Prime Minister, and it is on Labor's stage 3 tax cuts. Can you explain the economic benefit of giving a federal politician, or anyone else earning more than $200,000 a year, an extra $9,000 a year off on their tax while someone on the minimum wage gets nothing?

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

I thank the honourable member for his question. As the honourable member knows and appreciates, I'm sure, the government's position on stage 3 tax cuts hasn't changed, for all of the reasons that we've talked about all of the other times that we've been asked in this place and elsewhere.

I know that the Leader of the Greens put out a press release in the last 24 hours, saying that, were we to go down the path that the Greens are proposing, there would be an opportunity to provide more funds in important areas like child care and health care. I'm very pleased to inform the Greens, and the parliament as well, that there will be in the budget in October game-changing investments in health care and in child care. We are especially proud of the fact that the biggest new investment in the budget that I will hand down from this dispatch box next month will be that game-changing investment in child care, because cheaper child care is cost-of-living relief with an economic dividend. Australian parents deserve to have that option—which the minister was talking about before and which other colleagues have talked about on other occasions—to work more and earn more if they want to, and we want the childcare system to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem in that regard.

So there will be game-changing investments in child care. There will be the investments in health care that the health minister ran through before. They will be important elements of the budget. But our position on the tax cuts that the member asked me about hasn't changed.