Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. As a direct result of the government's runaway spending, the average Australian mortgage holder is now paying $27,000 more in interest a year under Labor. Will the Treasurer guarantee that the budget won't add further pressure to inflation and to interest rates?

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

He's got a lot of nerve asking about the fiscal position, having just gone to an election promising higher taxes, bigger deficits and more debt if they'd won the election. We stack up our record on responsible economic management against theirs any day.

When it comes to the budget position, to give honourable members a sense of the magnitude of the savings that we've found, including as recently as the mid-year budget update in December, in every single one of our seven budgets and budget updates, we've found savings. There will be more savings in the budget in May. There's $114 billion already so far, including $20 billion of savings in the December update. To give you a sense of that, it took those opposite something like seven budget updates to find the same amount of savings that Katy Gallagher and I found in December. That gives you a sense of how ridiculous it is to be lectured on fiscal responsibility by those opposite.

The budget in May will be another responsible budget. What we have been able to achieve so far is to help engineer the biggest positive turnaround in the budget position in nominal terms since Federation. We turned a couple of big Liberal Party deficits into a couple of Labor Party surpluses. We've got the deficits down. We banked most of the upward revisions to revenue, when those opposite used to spend most of them. We found ways to make room for our priorities, so the budget in May will be a responsible budget once again.

Obviously we don't finish the budget on the last day in March; we finish the budget closer to the first week in May, and we hand it down in the second week of May. What that budget will contain is another effort on savings, another effort on tax reform and more effort on productivity. We're working through these issues in a methodical and considered way, which is a hallmark of this government's responsible economic management.

Those opposite wouldn't know the first thing about responsible economic management. When the member for Hume was the shadow Treasurer, he took to the election of policy for higher taxes on 14 million working Australians, and he still managed to find a way to have bigger deficits and more debt. If their argument is that an extra couple of billion dollars on fuel excise relief for Australians, which they called for, would put upward pressure on inflation, then they are conceding that the $11 billion bigger deficit that those opposite would have had had they won the election this year would have made our inflation challenge and other challenges in our economy worse under them rather than better.