Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

The government hasn't changed its position on stage 3. Our focus in this budget, as we had said from the outset, was to deliver on our election commitments: to sensibly take pressure off the cost of living for Australians and businesses—where we could do so without impacting on inflation—and to deal with the waste and rorts of the previous government. They were the objectives of the October budget. The tax cuts don't come in for another two years.

What this budget does is substantial investment. On the payments side, there's a $33 billion increase in the indexation arrangements for payments to help deal with some of the cost-of-living pressures that fixed and low-income households are under. There's also half a billion dollars going to the community sector to deal with their indexation challenge that's been ignored for the last 10 years and to deal with some of the cost-of-living pressures that those organisations are under. And there's the first step in a pretty serious package for women as well. I don't think it's an either/or. What this budget does is to set out the challenges ahead. The Treasurer and I have made no secret of the spending pressures that are coming our way. And you can see that, if you look at the medium-term projections and acknowledge that those five big spending programs are not going to change: we're going to see defence, aged care, hospitals, the NDIS, and the cost of servicing $1 trillion of debt going to continue to place pressure on the budget. We want a pretty upfront discussion about how we value those services, how we provide those services and how we will meet the cost of them into the future, and this is the first step in that discussion. I think the Australian people are up for that discussion, and they've got a responsible government that's prepared to have it with them.