Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In taking note of answers this afternoon, the coalition is completely out of touch with the real issues facing Australians, just as the questions they posed to the government were. Looking at the cost of living in our country, we have a shadow Treasurer who is so out of touch with the needs of our country that he calls substantial cost-of-living relief 'manipulation'. Fancy that—manipulation! And we have, coming from the opposition, policies that would pull the rug out of our economy at the very worst possible time. Indeed, at a time when we have an economy that is barely growing, it is absolute economic insanity to slash and burn as the opposition would have government do at this time.

Some $315 billion worth of cuts would leave our economy in a critical condition. Meanwhile, we know they also had on their agenda—which we have undone and which eventually they, sensibly, voted for—tax cuts that they had targeted at the very highest income earners in our nation. Had we not delivered the redistribution of those tax cuts, we would have left the Australian economy and household incomes in a dire, dire plight.

We have an opposition that does not want to fight inflation. You are here, day after day, to fight your ideological battle with us for your own electoral purposes, but, in doing so, you are fighting against the interests of the Australian people. You don't want to help Australians; you want Australians to get hurt and have a hard landing so you can manipulate it for electoral purposes.

You've left us with debt and deficit as far as the eye can see, and now you want to bring forth cuts and chaos on the Australian people. We, the Labor government, are committed to doing the hard work of getting the balance right. I'm proud to be part of those efforts and to see our ministers working hard day after day to balance our books and get our policies right. Meaningful, substantial cost-of-living relief that helps everyone in the fight against inflation is not there to smash what is—as we all acknowledge—an already soft economy.

We know inflation is higher than we'd like, but it is less than half of its peak and is much lower than what we inherited from the coalition. At the election just two years ago, inflation had a six in front of it; now it's come down to have a three in front of it. We know we've got more work to do, but it's good to see that underlying inflation has moderated and we now have momentum towards inflationary pressures heading downward. That is a good achievement. We are pushing in the right direction. Of course we'd love it to be faster, but you're not helping. You're not doing the work to push inflation down; all you're doing is pointing the finger. Monthly inflation has hit a four-month low. Our budget strategy is helping in the fight against inflation, not hampering it.

As we know, fiscal policy isn't the primary determinant of prices in our economy, but our decisions in the budget and as a government are here to help—and they are helping. We want to be, and indeed we are, a government that, day after day, in the last budget, this budget, and the next budget, takes the edge off inflation. That's why we've delivered back-to-back surpluses—