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

I thank Senator Pratt for the question. It's great to get a question from the good senator from WA. The Labor government remains focused on dealing with the challenge of inflation, but, against that, we're also delivering important services to the Australian community and, indeed, assisting where we can with cost-of-living pressures.

We take our job very seriously about how we got our budget back into shape, how we've got wages moving again and how we could deliver tax cuts in a better and fairer way that ensured everybody who pays tax got a tax cut. Of course, most importantly in terms of the challenge of dealing with inflation, we turned Liberal debt—hundreds of billions of dollars of Liberal debt—into Labor surpluses. We've had two Labor surpluses, and we know that they find it very hard to deal with that.

Our strong economic management and our back-to-back surpluses have been helpful in dealing with the inflation challenge. This demonstrates those dual responsibilities which the governor talked about in her press conference following the RBA board meeting in terms of making sure that we are not only dealing with inflation but also, importantly, providing the services to the Australian people that they expect. We've got a list of achievements over the last two years that we've delivered in relation to the economy and cost of living and in our housing agenda. We are delivering on the promises we took to the last election.

There is more work to do, but we know that fake outrage over there. The only people unhappy that there wasn't an interest rate increase last week were the federal opposition. They were praying, 'Please, can we have one because nothing would give us greater pleasure?', while we are focused on the real issues. (Time expired)