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

The short answer is no. Given that I have longer to expand on that I'll say about our budget, which included $40 billion worth of savings across October and May, which was approximately $40 billion more than the last budgets of your government, the peak of inflation in the quarter was in March 2022, which was under your government's economic policies. We have said for some time that inflation remains the major challenge across our economy and that it is staying higher for longer than we would like. Our budget has been calibrated to ensure that fiscal policy is working hand in hand with monetary policy and that the decisions we took didn't make the bank's job any harder.

We acknowledge that people are doing it tough, which is why we showed the restraints we had in our budget by banking the revenue, by banking 87 per cent of the upward revisions to revenue, by finding $40 billion worth of savings, by ending the waste and rorts and by rebuilding the Public Service so that it can deliver the services that the Australian people expect. We still found room, as we should have, for $14.6 billion worth of cost-of-living measures. They go to investments in Medicare, investments in cheaper medicines, investments in child care and investments in people relying on payments because they're doing it tough. We made investments in energy bill relief, in investing in skilling the workforce for the future, in ensuring that we're dealing with the energy transition and in making sure Australia is positioned to grab the opportunities that are coming from the decarbonisation that we're seeing across the global economy. We are doing all that, and we still have the bank and the Treasury secretary confirming that our budget was not inflationary. (Time expired)