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

In blue-collar industries like manufacturing and in the services sector, more than nine in every 10 workers will get a bigger tax cut.

Between today's question time and tomorrow's question time, the House will get the opportunity to vote on our cost-of-living tax cuts. After all of their huffing and puffing, red faced incoherence, breathless incompetence and nasty negativity, after they called for an election on the issue and after the shadow Treasurer equated bigger tax cuts for more people with Marxism, they now say that they're voting for our changes. What a humiliating capitulation!

When the time comes, this side of the House will vote for our tax changes enthusiastically. Those opposite will vote for them reluctantly. We know what they really think about these tax cuts, and that's because the deputy leader was asked if they'd roll them back if they win the election, and she said that was absolutely their position. They have abandoned Middle Australia in opposition, just as they abandoned them in government. The opposition leader wanted to boycott 200,000 Woolies workers. We all remember that. Then they tried to abandon 11½ million workers who will get a bigger tax cut.

They don't even pretend to care about the cost of living anymore. If they cared, they'd ask questions about it and they'd vote for it enthusiastically. For the best part of a decade, Middle Australia didn't get a look in. That changed under this Prime Minister and this government, and it revealed the defining difference between this side and that side. We want more Australians earning more and keeping more of what they earn. They want people earning less and working longer for less.

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