If you’re still with us (sympathies) now might be the time to grab something to help you through the next few minutes.

Here is Angus Taylor’s first response:

Well, this is a big-spending budget for the next five weeks, not for the next five years and what we see in it is a promise of 70 cents a day in a year’s time which will do nothing to restore Australians’ standard of living to where it was when Labor came to power. There are better structural fundamental solutions to the cost-of-living crisis. That is not what is being offered by Labor, and so we won’t support what they’re doing here

Q: You do not support the tax cuts?

Taylor:

No. Look, let’s be clear: They are a cruel hoax. They are not a genuine tax cut. 70 cents a day, 73 cents a day in a year’s time, when for a typical Australian family with a mortgage they are paying an extra $50,000 over around above what they expected.

We need a pathway back to the standard of living that Australians had when Labor came to power that. Is not what is being offered by this Budget. We don’t get there until the end of the decade and that’s simply not good enough Let’s be clear, the Treasurer described them as top-up tax cut as went along with the previous tax relief that the Government has offered during this term.

Q: Should the tax cuts have gone further. Is that what you wanted to see and sooner?

Taylor:

If you manage the economy, sooner? you don’t see a collapse in people’s standard of living.

Taylor has literally just been on a ‘marginal seat tour’ about the ‘$3,500 in additional tax’ he says you are paying under Labor, (without mentioning that is because most people are earning more, so therefore are paying more tax, or that it is the loss of the low and middle income tax offset, which the Coalition – his government – phased out). And now he is saying that he does not support the tax cut.