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

The member for Hume mustn't have been listening to the answer I provided a few minutes ago, in response to his colleague, at the outset of question time. If the member for Hume, the shadow Treasurer, is just now, after four months in office, getting his head around the commitments that we took to the Australian people in May of this year and won the election on, then he's even slower on the uptake than we feared.

We took a whole bunch of commitments to the election, and many of the commitments that we took to the election are all about making up for the fact that over this wasted decade of missed opportunities and messed up priorities there hasn't been the investment that we need to see in training. That's why we've got these rampant labour and skills shortages holding back the economy. There hasn't been the investment that we wanted in working parents. That's why we've needed to introduce today the childcare legislation that those opposite can't support, even though it will be a game changer for Australian parents and for Australian families and the Australian economy more broadly.

We're proud of the commitments that we took to the election. We're proud of the responsible investments that we proposed to the Australian people for cleaner and cheaper energy and a better trained workforce and cheaper child care, and all of the things that have been made necessary by the economic failures of those opposite over the best part of a decade that they spent trying to push people's wages down and making it harder and harder to make ends meet.

Our position on the economy, our position on taxes, our position on the commitments we took to the election, haven't changed. We will tally them up in the budget next month in the usual way and present it from this place. In that budget, that I will be proud to hand down on behalf of the Albanese government, we will make some of the investments that the economy's been crying out for for some time. We will make responsible changes to the spending, to the money that they sprayed around en route to delivering a trillion dollars in debt with nowhere near enough to show for it.

I hope that the author of that steaming little pile of Thatcherite platitudes today continues to ask me questions about the cost of living—they having chased down wages for a decade—about tax—on their watch, their tax record was to hand down more taxes—he asked me about taxes, Mr Speaker.

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