Shadow Treasurer Ted O’Brien is on his feet again, with another question to Treasurer Jim Chalmers about today’s inflation uptick.

The Treasurer has gone from bored eye rolling to annoyed tutting.

Ted O’Brien:

Will the Treasurer now concede it is time to stop Labor’s spending spree?

Jim Chalmers:

You can’t believe a word he says. The way that he just characterised my earlier answer has no relationship with reality. Leaving that aside for one moment, I think the Shadow Treasurer, once again, has impeccable timing, asking me about government spending and the budget position in the week that Fitch ratings agency has reaffirmed Australia’s triple A credit rating. The reason they’ve done that is because our budget position is one of the strongest in the G20. That’s because, unlike those opposite in ways unrecognisable to them in government, we’ve banked most of the upward revisions to revenue. We’ve found $100 billion in savings. We delivered two surpluses in our first two years when those opposite couldn’t deliver a single one in nine years. We’ve got the deficit down to about a fifth of what we inherited from those opposite. We’ve got debt down by $188 billion since we came to office, and that’s saving the Australian people $60 billion in interest … We’ll stack up our record against yours any day.