Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. I understand the government is optimistic that Australia will not fall into a recession. In Fowler, charities are seeing unprecedented numbers of middle-income families needing help. Small businesses are struggling to keep up with increased costs and are not seeing the same level of customers. More people are now working a second job to meet the cost-of-living pressure. We're yet to feel the impact of the 12 interest rate hikes. How confident should the Australian public be that we're not heading into a recession, if we're not already in one?

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

Thank you to the honourable member for Fowler for her question and her representation. It is not currently the expectation of the Treasury or the Reserve Bank or a number of other credible institutions and forecasters that Australia will go down that path. But what we've tried to do on this side of the House is to be up-front about the challenges that we do confront in our economy, and we see it in the budget, before that and after that, that we do expect the Australian economy to slow considerably. This is the inevitable consequence of the interest rate rises, which began before the election and continued after, and also the substantial slowdown in the global economy. And so I say to your constituents, and I say to communities right around Australia, that what we are trying to do and what we are doing in our first two budgets is to try to provide help where we can to get your constituents and communities around Australia through a difficult and challenging period in the global and domestic economies, provide some help where we can and also lay the foundations for future growth at the same time.

One of the ways that we do that is to make sure we get the budget in much better nick so that we can afford to help people and so that we can invest, whether it's in energy or in technology or in the skills and capacities of our people, meaningfully in the future so that we can weather the storm which is coming at us from around the world at the same time as we lay the foundations for a better future and a stronger economy as well.

One of the reasons we're able to do that, which would be completely unrecognisable to those opposite, is we've worked out over two budgets how do we try to get genuine value for money from these investments? That means winding back on the waste and rorts which defined the economic mismanagement on that side of the House for too long, which is one of the big reasons why we had this wasted decade in our economy. It's one of the reasons why we inherited $1 trillion worth of debt with nowhere near enough to show for it. It's why we inherited deficits as far as the eye can see. And it's why, even after a decade in office of those opposite, there were so many economic challenges for us to address.

We accept responsibility for addressing the challenges in the economy. We're up-front about what's coming at us from around the world but being felt around the kitchen tables of Fowler and communities right around the country. We are prepared to work with anyone in this place who shares our objective to get people through a difficult patch at the same time as we invest in the future.