Politics with Michelle Grattan: Jim Chalmers and Angus Taylor on tax top-ups and budget bottom lines

As the election starter’s gun is about to be fired, Tuesday’s budget announced modest income tax cuts as the government’s latest cost-of-living measure. The Coalition has opposed the tax relief, with Peter Dutton’s Thursday budget reply to put forward his policy counters on the cost of living.

Meanwhile, the domestic economic debate is being conducted as President Donald Trump prepares to unveil more tariffs, which are likely to produce further uncertainty in the world economy.

On this podcast we are joined by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor.

Chalmers says the government is making every last-minute effort to argue against Australia being hit with more US tariffs. He’s ready to make personal representations if that’s thought useful.

I’ve been discussing that with Don Farrell, the minister for trade, whether or not that would be helpful to some of the efforts that he’s currently engaged in. So we’re working as a team on it. We’re working out the best [and] most effective ways to engage with the Americans. Again, speaking up for and standing up for our national interest.

We’re not uniquely impacted by the tariffs either already imposed or proposed. But we’ve got a lot of skin in the game here. We’re a trading nation, we generate a lot of prosperity on global markets.

A criticism from some about the budget was that climate change wasn’t mentioned explicitly. Chalmers takes issue with that.

I would have thought that an extra A$3 billion for green metals, which is about leveraging our traditional strengths and resources, our developing industries and the energy transformation to create something that the world needs, I think that’s a climate change policy.

And also the Innovation Fund, another $1.5 billion or so for the Innovation Fund in terms of sustainable aviation fuels, that’s a climate policy and also we’re recapitalising another couple of billion for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

So in every budget, we’ve made new investments in climate change and in energy and this week’s budget was no different in that regard.

Angus Taylor is scathing about Labor’s “top-up” tax cuts, which were the budget’s centrepiece, saying:

A government that has overseen an unprecedented collapse in our living standards, unrivalled by any other country in the world, and they’re trying to tell Australians that 70 cents a day, more than a year from now, is a solution to that problem?

It’s laughable, it is not even going to touch the sides, it’s Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It’s a cruel hoax. And frankly, the idea that this is good government is absolutely laughable.

On what change of approach a Coalition government would take, Angus Taylor points to the “fiscal rules that we adhered to when we were last in government”.

They were on the back of the rules that were established in the Charter of Budget Honesty that was established by Peter Costello in the 1990s to make sure your economy grows faster than your spending. That doesn’t mean spending doesn’t grow, it just means your economy grows faster.

So both of those things matter, a faster growing economy and managing your spending so that it’s not growing faster. Jim Chalmers doesn’t get that.