Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bragg for the question and for remembering that there are other people in the chamber, other ministers who can answer questions. I've just been looking at the monthly inflation figures that have been released today and at the rate of 6.8 per cent in the month of February, which is lower than the 7.4 per cent rate reported in January 2023. But I don't think it's any surprise—and I've been saying for some time in this chamber—that one of the significant challenges facing the budget and the decisions we are taking in relation to the budget is how we deal with the inflation challenge, how we provide sensible cost-of-living relief where we can without adding to the inflation challenge across the economy.

That requires us to show some restraint—where we've got revenue upgrades, to look at how we bank those upgrades. In October we banked 99 per cent of those upgrades in the first two years, and I think it was 92 per cent over the four years. That gives you an indication of the fiscally responsible way that we will go about making these decisions, and we're doing that against the backdrop of increasing pressures on the budget, whether from defence, from the NDIS, from health, from aged care or from some of the terminating measures—cleaning up the mess that we are also working through and have been talking about in this chamber this week. So, you'll see the budget when it's released, but the question Senator Bragg asked of me is certainly front and centre in the minds of all of us who participate through the ERC process.