QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Minister for Finance, Minister for the Public Service, Minister for Women, Minister for Government Services and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (14:07): I thank Senator Ghosh for that question. It's an important question about how the government have been managing the budget in a way that allows us to provide that really important cost-of-living help to households, including in the good state of WA.

As we heard yesterday, there's some welcome news from the Reserve Bank—to hold interest rates steady at 4.35 per cent. This is, I think, a decision that households right around the country would have welcomed yesterday, and it's off the back of headline inflation being down for the third consecutive month in the latest data, with trimmed mean inflation holding steady—higher than we would like and certainly for longer than we would like, but that was some welcome news yesterday from the bank.

But, in conjunction with the decisions we've made in the budget, where we have found significant savings that allow us to repair the budget over time, to lower the debt and to lower the interest on that debt, we have also been able to make sensible and important investments into cost-of-living help, as Senator Ghosh asked. There's a tax cut for every taxpayer this year and next.

There are cheaper medicines, record hospital funding in our agreements with the states and record education funding—again, in our agreements with the states. We're supporting improvements and increases in wages to get wages moving again after a decade of wage stagnation. We're making important investments in social and affordable housing and helping first home buyers with that five per cent deposit scheme that has been so enormously successful.

There's relief for students with free TAFE. We're slashing student debt and expanding paid prac, with some recent announcements in that regard, and making sure we're doing everything we can to keep prices at supermarkets as low as they should be. The PRESIDENT: Senator Ghosh, first supplementary?