Sussan Ley is back (along with her very sensible voice – a bemused Coalition MP was telling me that it is part of the ‘we are being very sensible’ decree from Ley, as well as the Liberals are hoping for some sort of juxtaposition between a very cool and calm Ley and a ‘raving’ Albanese. That’s pretty obvious, but doesn’t account for the fact that Albanese is not Morrison and doesn’t instinctively talk down to women.)

Ley:

My question is to the Prime Minister. Since coming to office, Labor has added $144 billion of debt and the most recent budget says Australia will be in deficit for at least the next 10 years. Treasury has now advised the government that the only way it can fix its broken budget is by raising taxes on hard working Australians. Last week the Prime Minister refused to rule this out. Will the Prime Minister now rule out raising taxes on hard-working Australians?

Jim Chalmers has a lot to yell about this, and Milton Dick tells him to shut it. No doubt there will be dixers for that.

Albanese:

We have just been through an election with two alternative propositions. One on this side of the House, giving tax cuts to every single Australian taxpayers and pair, all 14 million of them, building on the tax cuts that we introduced and from 1 July last — and implemented from 1 July last year, making a saving of around about $50 for people out there, average workers, making a difference, not just representing people who are members of Parliament, representing the people who are in our constituencies. When we made that announcement, those opposite, I well recall saying that they would roll it back absolutely, they would roll it back. I well remember that. (INTERJECTIONS)

So we thought when the Treasurer came to the budget in March of this year, with a proposition for not one but two tax cuts over the next term – this term now of government, we thought, ‘Well, they’ll just wave it through. They’ll wave it through. They won’t commit the same position that they did last time, which was to say they oppose odd it before they knew what it was.”

Then they said they’d roll it back and then they said we should have an early election on it. But sure enough, the as night follows day, we overestimated them because what they did was they said that they were opposed to it.

They then voted against it and then they said they would introduce legislation into this Parliament during this term to increase taxation for all 14 million Australians. (INTERJECTIONS) But it takes some credit given the question also asks about debt as well as taxation to actually not only have a plan to increase taxation, they had a plan to increase the deficit over two years (INTERJECTIONS) as well. Creative if nothing else are those opposite. (INTERJECTIONS) We have reduced the debt by $177 billion. We produced two budget surpluses and a reduced deficit in the current year and for the year’s…

Sussan Ley has a point of order that is not a point of order.

Albanese finishes with:

Less debt and lower taxes on this side of the House. More debt and higher taxes on that side of the House. They’ve got a private members’ bill to wipe out every bit of emissions policy going back to John Howard in the year 2000. Will they introduce a private members’ bill to increase the income tax for all 14 million Australians? I await for one of their backbenchers to do that.