Jim Chalmers

from a position of relative strength compared to a lot of our peers.

Look, I think as my colleague said on the night that the hostilities began, there are important strategic reasons why the Americans did what they did.

And our job has been to support the UAE and other friends in the region to look after 115,000 Australians.

who are in the area, including, I think, a bit under a quarter of those in the UAE itself.

And so we've made our position on this conflict clear.

You know, from a purely, as I said before, from a purely markets point of view, purely economic point of view, the part of the shop that I'm responsible for, whatever the reasons for going in, obviously the end of the hot part of the conflict can't come soon enough because we've got to repair these supply chains.

And the longer it drags out, the more lasting damage there is done to

economies like ours, and as a government which is very focused on the people-facing part of the economy, unemployment, inflation, all of these indicators which impact the heaviest on real people and real communities right around Australia, then obviously we're very concerned about how long this is dragging out and the economic consequences of that, plus the consequences of however long it takes us to get the show back on the road.

Well, I think as all of the rest of the discussion we've had today, Alan makes clear that the kind of final landing point, the underlying cash balance is obviously a long way from being determined.

But from our point of view, we're continuing to work on those three interrelated packages.

There will be savings in the budget.

how much in savings is still to be determined, but there will be savings.

There's been savings in all seven of the updates that Katie and I have handed down so far, and there'll be savings in the eighth.

It's been one of the reasons why we've been able to get the budget position in a substantially better place than where it was

three and a half, four years ago.

So there'll be more savings.

There will be tax reform.

And again, we haven't taken the key decisions on that.

We wouldn't in normal times have taken those decisions yet, but because of this extra layer of uncertainty, as you rightly pointed out before, there's a bit more flexibility later in the process to land some of those.

Now, the productivity package is absolutely important in any scenario because it's about making sure that we can lift the speed limit on the economy.