Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Given last night's cruel hoax of a budget, can the Prime Minister explain how giving struggling Australians just 70 cents a day in 15 months time will help them with their mortgage, energy, insurance and grocery bills today?

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

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question. He asked about people under cost-of-living pressure—the same guy who voted earlier today against tax cuts that would top up the tax cuts from last year to deliver $2½ thousand for people. That's $2½ thousand in people's pockets that they said they'd oppose before they saw it. Then they said they would roll it back, and then they called for an election—a year ago! That's how much they hated it; they hated tax cuts. This is the mob that want to cut everything to pay for $600 billion of their nuclear reactors. They want to cut education, and they want to cut health, but what they don't want to cut is people's income taxes.

I'm asked about the cost of living. Well, we have introduced, of course, not just the tax cuts for all; we've ensured that real wages have increased five quarters in a row. When they were in office they decreased five quarters in a row—not as an accident and not because of other factors but because it was a deliberate design feature of the economic architecture of those opposite. We also have produced not one, not two, but three tranches of energy bill relief.

We are delivering the largest investment into Medicare since Medicare was created. And, in the health sector, we have tripled the bulk-billing incentive, firstly for 11 million Australians; then we built on that for 25 million Australians in last night's budget with an $8½ billion injection. But it's not just that. We also provided funding for 50 urgent care clinics so that people can go to the midpoint between their GP and an emergency department, and all they need is their Medicare card. That is all that they need. But those opposite, of course, regard urgent care clinics as wasteful spending. Then we come to medicines—something that they opposed. They opposed the 60-day dispensing; well, we now have medicines down to $25, the same price that they were in 2004.

We have free TAFE, which they've opposed as well. There'll be a vote on that in the Senate, later today, to make it permanent. We'll wait and see what those opposite will do about that, but I suspect they'll oppose that as well. They have opposed every single measure—every single one. They have also opposed the actions that we've taken to get the budget into better nick.