Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We got a lecture on taxes today from the mob who were the second highest taxing government in the last 30 years, the highest taxing government since John Howard's government; from a party that just, in the last couple of weeks, voted against a tax cut on cars in this place. We didn't just get a lecture on taxes; we got a lecture on the cost of living from the mob that kept wages deliberately low for a decade and from a shadow Treasurer who tried to keep secret a 20 per cent increase in electricity prices. We got a lecture on debt from the mob who doubled the debt even before the pandemic and left us with rising interest costs on the trillion dollars of debt that they left behind. And we got a lecture on productivity from the same people who gave us the worst decade of productivity in the last 50 years.

I don't know what's more concerning—that the Shadow Treasurer might not be the sharpest tool in the Liberal Party's shed or that he might be the sharpest tool in the Liberal Party's shed. Only in a Liberal Party this bereft of ideas and talent would the member for Hume even get a look in, in a serious economic portfolio, so we won't be copping lectures from the leftovers of the last government, not on tax, not on spending, not on borrowing, not on the cost of living, not from the dregs of the government which presided over a wasted decade of missed opportunities and messed up priorities and which left us a mess that will take more than one budget to clean up.

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