Lambie unleashes on surplus celebrations

Outspoken independent senator Jacqui Lambie says the federal government’s $15.8bn budget surplus would be better spent helping struggling Australians “put bread and milk on the table”.

The May budget forecast a $9.3bn surplus for 2023-24, but the final budget outcome has pushed that up to $15.8bn, giving Labor the first back-to-back budget in 15 years.

But Senator Lambie said on Monday people were more concerned about cost-of-living pressures than the government’s chunky fiscal win.

“Nobody gives a stuff about a surplus,” she told Nine’s Today show.

“Mate, I can assure you right now people are doing it hard out there. Nobody’s talking about a surplus.”

She said Australians would be asking why the government was not pushing “some of that surplus out to us so we can put bread and milk on the table for our kids and do that without raising the inflation.”

Senator Lambie said “people are really hurting out there”.

“Honestly, give them more. Find a way to do it,” she said.

The surplus follows last fiscal’s year’s $22.1bn.

It is a marked turnaround from the pre-election budget and fiscal outlook in 2022, when the Coalition was still in power, which forecast a $56.5bn deficit for this financial year.

The surplus also pours cold water on the Coalition’s claims the government has a problem with runaway spending.

Commenting on this year’s revised surplus, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Labor had “found almost $80bn in savings” since entering government.

“But really the key here … is the fact that when we’ve got upward revisions to revenue, because the labour market’s been a bit stronger, or our exports have been performing well,” he told the ABC.

“We’ve banked almost all of those upward revisions to revenue, and if we hadn’t shown that spending restraint, we wouldn’t be anywhere near these two consecutive surpluses for the first time in almost two decades.”

Gross debt has also improved by about $17.bn, from a forecasted $923bn to a final figure of $906.9bn.

More to come