Treasurer Jim Chalmers has defended his handling of the federal budget. Mr Chalmers says Labor has struck the right balance, with their overall economic strategy.
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00:00We've maintained a primary focus on inflation and the cost of living without ignoring our
00:08brought up responsibilities to people when it comes to Medicare and medicines and pensions
00:14and the like and also without ignoring the very substantial risks to growth.
00:20We need to remember in the international context that most of the OECD has had a negative quarter
00:25of growth. We have escaped a negative quarter of growth to date. Our gross debt position
00:31is a fraction of what we see in comparable countries and our budget improvement since
00:372021 has been much faster than the average of advanced economies and the specific comparison
00:45with the economies that we usually refer to.
00:49And so we have made a lot of progress and you can see that progress in the document
00:53today, even with a little bit of slippage in some of the years, a $200 billion turnaround
00:59since we were elected is the biggest nominal consolidation in the budget on record.
01:05And we've managed to get the deficit for this year a little bit smaller as well, but much
01:10smaller than was anticipated a couple of years ago.