Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. When did the Treasurer or his office instruct Treasury to undertake work on the legislated stage 3 tax cuts?

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

Once again, the shadow Treasurer is a day late and a dollar short when it comes to these questions. It is a matter of public record now, because of the conversation at the committee chaired by Senator Hume, that, in response to the Prime Minister and I making it very clear that we wanted more cost-of-living relief options, we knew that, in addition to the cost-of-living relief that was already flowing, we wanted to do something bigger and broader without putting extra pressure on inflation. We made that clear over the course of summer. The Prime Minister, I think on multiple occasions—he ran through them a moment ago—said that publicly. We indicated that privately as well. And as the Treasury has made clear, on 11 December they conveyed to colleagues in the Treasury that they thought that using the tax system would be an appropriate way to provide more cost-of-living relief to more people without putting extra pressure on inflation.

I think people know that over the course of summer we have been looking for more ways to provide more help to more people, and it became increasingly clear to us in the lead-up to the cabinet decision on 23 January that the tax system had an important role to play there. So my advice to the opposition is to stop searching around and lurching around for excuses to oppose bigger tax cuts for more people to deal with the cost of living. What we've been motivated by here is the pressure that people are under and we're actually doing something about it.