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

My question is to the Prime Minister. Despite Labor's pre-election promises, under this government, living standards have fallen by nearly nine per cent. The household savings rate is down 10 percentage points. Personal income tax payments are over 25 per cent higher, and a homeowner with a typical mortgage is over $35,000 worse off. Why won't the Prime Minister admit his government has been a disaster, as more Australian families are working harder and longer but still going backwards?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the shadow Treasurer for his question. He has exhausted his annual quota of questions to the Treasurer in one morning, and now we're back on! I'm asked about the economy and the comparative performance of the former government compared with our government, and I'm happy to answer. Inflation peaked under the former government. When we came to office, it had a six in front of it, and now it has a three in front of it. Six or three, which is better? We prefer three, and that is why we've been delivering not one but two budget surpluses—

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

The member for Herbert is now warned.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

something that those opposite, I'm not surprised, can't recognised.

But the other thing that we've been doing, whilst we've been putting downward pressure on inflation, whilst it's continuing to moderate, is making sure that people aren't left behind in that process, that we don't just let it rip with $315 billion of cuts, which is what those opposite are suggesting. So we make no apologies for the fact that we came into this parliament at the beginning of this year and we changed the Liberals tax cuts for high-income earners into Labor's tax cuts for every working Australian, all 13.6 million of them, because we want to make sure that people earn more and keep more of what they earn. We make no apologies, either, for coming in here and increasing the wages of aged-care workers, and later this week we'll have legislation to increase the wage for early educators as well. It's these sorts of measures that have seen the gender pay gap reduced to the lowest level in our history, which is something that we are very proud of.

We want to get real wages growing again. They've been up in the last three consecutive quarters. We make no apologies, either, for making sure that our policies have led to the fact that almost one million jobs have been created on our watch. But we're not just dealing with the immediate pressures by providing that cost-of-living support—all of which has been opposed by those opposite. We're also setting up Australia's future, through the Future Made in Australia agenda and by not being frightened of the future but trying to shape it in the interests of working people so that we not only create the jobs through the shift that's happening in the global economy—through things like production tax credits in critical minerals—but also make sure that we train people for those jobs, through our universities accord and fee-free TAFE.