QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Dr CHALMERS (Rankin—Treasurer) (14:25): Actually, I share credit when inflation comes down. As I have on many occasions from this dispatch box, I make the point that the government is playing a helpful and meaningful role in our economic progress but that the credit belongs to the Australian people, who work hard and provide for their loved ones and do the best they can.

If the shadow Treasurer is going to get a very rare question, he may as well get it right and quote me accurately. I always share credit when things go well in our economy, and I take responsibility for working through the challenges, as they present themselves, in our economy. I take responsibility for the fact that this cabinet and this government have cleaned up much of the mess that those opposite left us in the budget.

I take responsibility for the fact that we've worked together with the Australian people to deliver two surpluses, when those opposite couldn't deliver a single one in nine years. I take responsibility for the fact that we've got real wages growing again, after a decade of deliberate wage suppression and wage stagnation. We take responsibility for the fact that living standards are recovering, after they were falling sharply under those opposite.

We take responsibility to work through the challenges in our economy, whether those challenges are inflation, business investment or more work that we need to do when it comes to the sustainability of the budget. If the shadow Treasurer wants to ask me about the comments of the Reserve Bank governor, then he should acknowledge that this is what the Reserve Bank governor has said: 'We have got relatively low debt, compared to the other countries, relatively low debt-to-GDP ratios.

We've had a couple of surpluses, and the most recent deficit, in fact, is quite small as well.' The last time that the Reserve Bank looked at their forecast for public demand—which is government spending, largely—they revised down their forecast in the near term. So if the shadow Treasurer is going to get a rare outing at the dispatch box he should quote the Reserve Bank governor the right way and he should quote me the right way.

We've made a lot of progress in our economy, but we know the job is not done. We had a hell of a mess to clean up when we came to office. We've made progress on inflation.

We've made progress in the budget. We've made progress on real wages. We've made progress on the gender gap.

We're rolling out cost-of-living help in the most responsible way that we can. Those opposite have opposed most of the cost-of-living help. If they had their way and had won the last election, Australians would be under more pressure, not less.