Sarah Ferguson presents Australia's premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.
SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: The world's finance ministers are in Washington DC for G20 , World Bank and IMF meetings, as the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine continue to cause global uncertainty.
So, all of this combines to create a sense of global economic uncertainty, and that will be a key feature of these discussions here. We'll get a really good read of the situation on inflation when we get the new figures out next week, next Wednesday. We'll get new data on inflation and what economists expect that to show is that we're making really substantial progress in the fight against inflation.
And the other comparison, which is really relevant right now, Sarah, is the IMF also put out a comparison this week that said that Australia has a top three budget in the whole world and we were 14th in the world when we came to office. Now, the IMF has made the point that what countries around the world, including Australia need to be doing, is in their jargon, repairing the fiscal buffers, which means in Australian parlance, getting the budget in much better nick and that's what we've been doing with those two surpluses.
We have also shown spending restraint unrecognisable to our predecessors and so combined, this responsible economic management, without which there wouldn't have been two surpluses, has been a really key part in the fight against inflation. JIM CHALMERS: Well, I think it is primarily a supply challenge and we've made that clear in a lot of different ways and one of the reasons why we're not going down the path of changing the negative gearing arrangements, abolishing negative gearing or abolishing the capital gains tax discount is because we haven't been convinced that would have a positive, that would have positive consequences for supply.
JIM CHALMERS: Well, first of all, it's important to remind your viewers that treasurers get advice on these sort of issues all the time. It's not especially unusual to get advice on contentious issues, or issues where there is a cost to the budget or where you have to provide a public report about the cost of some of these tax concessions. That's the first point.
It's full of wonderful ministers and local members, and they're focused exclusively on helping people with the cost of living, and their opponent will be all about savage cuts and that's the choice at the election. JACOB GREBER, CHIEF DIGITAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I don't think you can say it's always an absolute going to be of the table, because as we learnt with the Stage 3 tax debate, it's off the table until it's on the table.
So both sides now are really honing in on supply. There is a difference, I think, in approach. The government is talking about a lot more money for social housing, a lot more money for higher density housing, although they're not explicit about that. JACOB GREBER: Oh, I think that's probably a factor in it. I think the other thing is the Coalition would say that states have pulled back from some of the things they used to fund, like sewage, water, and their argument is that they're going to try to step into that gap.
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