Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. In his self-described year of delivery, and after 3½ years of Labor, the Prime Minister has delivered the largest decline in living standards in the developed world—lower productivity, more debt, higher inflation—and now, as many economists warn, the real prospect of high interest rates. Prime Minister, on this final sitting day of 2025, will the Prime Minister finally take responsibility for all these failures?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have reduced debt, reduced the interest that would have been paid on debt, because we turned the budget deficits of those opposite into a budget surplus in our first year. We turned their budget deficit into a surplus in our second year and produced a reduced deficit in our third year. Our economy is growing very unusually across the developed world but we have had zero quarters of negative growth. Inflation is down to half of what it was under those opposite. Interest rates have come down three times this year. Wages have increased eight quarters in a row. They are growing at the fastest pace since 2012, the last time Labor was in government. We had the lowest average unemployment rate of any government in 50 years, with 1.2 million additional jobs—three out of five full-time and four out of five in the private sector. We had the smallest gender pay gap on record. We had fewer days lost to industrial disputes compared with those opposite. We have a record number of small businesses, we have solid business investment and we've delivered a tax cut for every taxpayer, which, combined with the wages growth, means that people are earning more and keeping more of what they earn.

Those opposite want people to work longer for less. If they had their way, wages would be going down, people would not be able to work from home and tax cuts would not have been delivered. That was their platform that they went to the election on, and they managed to combine all of that with higher deficits. Higher deficits were what they proposed.

We have rolled out cost-of-living relief for every single household, energy bill relief, cheaper child care for 1.1 million families, cheaper medicines that have saved Australians more than $1.5 billion, free TAFE for 725,000 enrolments, the largest increase in rent assistance in 30 years, and student debt relief for more than three million Australians, all of it opposed by those opposite, all of it opposed by a coalition that's just too busy fighting each other to fight for Australians.