On the public service cuts, treasurer Jim Chalmers has appeared on ABC News Breakfast to say it is business as usual:

First of all, you’re right to say it’s not an efficiency dividend. And it’s also very different to what our opponents were proposing in the lead-up to the last election, which is to slash tens of thousands of jobs. As I said to you a moment ago, we’re not asking every department to cut their staff by 5%. We’re not asking them all to cut their budgets by 5%. We’re doing what responsible governments do, which is – in the lead-up to budgets, we say, “Where is your spending lower priority, and do we need to redirect that to higher-priority areas?” We’ve been doing that now for four budgets, and it will be part of our efforts in the fifth, because there are very substantial pressures on the budget. We are cutting taxes, providing cost-of-living relief, strengthening Medicare, and doing all of the things that we said we would do. And in order to do that, you need to make room in budgets. We’ve been doing that for 3.5 years now, and people should expect that to continue.