David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. What are some of the pressures on the budget in October, and how will it start to deal with the economic challenges Australians confront?

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Hume will cease interjecting.

The member for Hume will cease interjecting—

as will the Manager of Opposition Business. I give the call to the Treasurer.

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

I take the interjection from the shadow Treasurer. It hasn't dawned on him that the $50 billion that was in last year's budget isn't available for either side of the parliament to spend. This really should be obvious to the shadow Treasurer, but it isn't.

I thank the honourable member for his question and for the way that he represents this community here in Canberra. When the parliament next meets, I'll be handing down the October budget on behalf of the new Albanese government. That budget will be handed down in the context of intensifying global pressures on the economy, pressures on spending here at home and pressures on Australian families as well. We know it's not the usual thing to deliver a second budget inside a year, but these are not usual circumstances.

Over the past few weeks, we've been levelling with Australians about some of the growing challenges to the economy and to the budget. Some of those challenges are from overseas, like the downturn in global growth, but some of them are homegrown as well, like a decade-long failure to properly invest in skills or in cleaner and cheaper power. Some of these challenges are temporary, and others have been building for some time and will take a little while to turn around. So these are the circumstances that we're working with as we put together this budget.

We begin with a trillion dollars of gross debt in the budget's saddlebags. What that means is that not every priority can be funded and not every issue in the economy can be fixed overnight. It means we do have to make difficult decisions like we have with the fuel excise returning to its normal setting as scheduled in the legislation passed by our predecessors. It will take more than one budget to clean up the mess that those opposite left and to build the better future that we all want. But the work has begun. It's begun when it comes to trimming wasteful spending. It's begun when it comes to investing in skills and energy and in our broken supply chains. And it's begun when it comes to providing responsible cost-of-living relief in a way that delivers an economic dividend and doesn't force the Reserve Bank's hand even more.

Throughout the course of the week, those opposite have been asking us about cost of living. If those opposite genuinely cared about the cost of living, they'd support our childcare package. If those opposite really cared about the cost of living, they'd support our tax cut for electric vehicles. If those opposite really cared about the cost of living, they wouldn't have spent the best part of a decade going after people's wages and working conditions, making it harder for them to make ends meet. I thought that the shadow minister for finance made a humiliating error on Sunday when she said that those opposite wouldn't have any policies, but, now that I see the intellectual horsepower in the shadow Treasurer's speech and in the questions he asked in this place, I think it's probably for the best.