QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Dr CHALMERS (Rankin—Treasurer) (14:02): A big thank you to the member for Spence, a champion for working people in his community north of Adelaide, for his important question. In advance of the G20 economic ministers meeting later this week, yesterday the IMF released the World Economic Outlook and today, in the last couple of hours, it released the Fiscal Monitor.

What the IMF has made really clear is that global uncertainty, which has been made worse by the ongoing, prolonged war in the Middle East, is pushing up inflation around the world. It's weighing on growth, and it's also putting pressure on budgets right across the advanced economies of the world. These will obviously be the key issues in the discussions that we have with my counterparts at those G20 engagements: a big focus on fuel security and oil prices, a big focus on bond yields and borrowing costs and also on attracting more investment here in Australia.

The difference between the Australian budget and the budgets of comparable countries is profound. Our budget is in much better condition than those of other countries. We've got a sliver of the gross debt as a share of the economy that the major advanced economies have.

We have the lowest average unemployment of any Australian government in 50 years. We've got stronger economic growth than all but one of the major advanced economies. So we've got a lot coming at us from around the world, but we've got a lot going for us as well.

One of the reasons for that is that we have been managing the budget in a responsible way in an uncertain global environment, recognising the pressures on inflation in our economy and the longer-term challenge of productivity. If you look at the longer-term outlook, the medium term in the budget, you can see that the big improvement over the medium term is driven primarily by the savings that were in the May budget.

But sensible tax reform has a role to play as well. That's why the trusts legislation we introduced today is so important. For 50 years in this country, different reports and reviews have recommended to governments that there be reform of tax on trusts, and we're taking that on.

Even though the use of trusts has doubled in the last 20 years, they're still used by only a fraction of the Australian population. More than 95 per cent of Australians don't get trust income. Less than 10 per cent of small businesses are expected to be impacted by the changes we are proposing.

So our tax reforms are all about cutting taxes for workers, which those opposite voted against. Our tax reforms are about making it easier for first-home buyers in the housing market. Those opposite voted against that, too.

Our tax changes are all about better aligning the tax treatment of income from working with income from assets. That's how we will make the tax system fairer and more sustainable into the future as part of managing the budget more responsibly in the face of all this global economic uncertainty in today's fiscal monitor.