QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Dr CHALMERS (Rankin—Treasurer) (14:44): I thank the member for Holt, an outstanding local member, for my third dorothy dixer today. I've had Holt, Goldstein and Farrer so far. With all the pressures on people in our communities, all the pressures on the budget, the serious challenges in our economy and severe uncertainty in the world, Australia has a lot going for it, despite all of that.

We saw it this week. We saw wages growth above three per cent, the longest sustained run of better than three per cent for the best part of two decades. We saw unemployment in the mid fours, the lowest average unemployment rate of any government in the last 50 years, which speaks to the resilience of our labour market and our economy.

We saw a record-low gender pay gap in the earnings data. A record number of new businesses were created. The insolvency rate went down again.

We passed new tax cuts for small business during the week. Both measures of consumer confidence came up a bit as well, but admittedly off a low base. And Moody's, as the Prime Minister said, reaffirmed Australia's AAA credit rating.

All those things happened this week. And when Moody's reaffirmed our credit rating they said it was because debt ratios at the Commonwealth level remain low, and that's supported by expenditure reforms and a record of conservative budgeting. We have one of the three strongest budgets in the G20.

Debt as a share of our economy is less than in any major advanced economy. And I made it clear before that most of the trillion dollars of debt in Australia's budget was racked up by those opposite. Most of the gross debt in the budget is Liberal debt.

We've been able to get gross debt down lower—$200 billion lower—than the trajectory we inherited from those opposite. Because of that, Australia is now paying $70 billion less in debt interest. In their last budget, they had debt crossing a trillion dollars three years ago, and today debt would be $1.2 trillion if they'd had their way.

If those opposite really cared about debt in the budget they wouldn't have gone to the last election with a policy to increase it, but that's what the member for Hume did. If they really cared about debt in the budget they wouldn't have already racked up, as the PM said, more than half a trillion dollars in unfunded commitments over the next decade. If they cared about debt their policy wouldn't be to make it worse.

But their policy is to make it worse. Most of the debt in the budget is Liberal Party debt. This side of the House is managing the economy and the budget in a responsible way, backed in by the major credit rating agencies around the world, with those welcome endorsements of the way we're going about this task in the face of severe global economic uncertainty.

Those opposite can't be taken seriously on the budget or on the economy.