Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Last night’s budget simply lacks credibility. It is a budget that is closely associated with spin, but has no spine. It is a typical Labor document: all about the spin but completely lacking in substance. The Treasurer said it was going to be boring, partly because he had released all of the details in the previous weeks to make sure there would be nothing interesting on budget night. He did this because he had a secret plan. He hoped that by pretending the budget was boring and had nothing of content in it he could get away with quietly and secretly putting his hand in your pocket to take more money out—to hurt Australians across the country with higher taxes and increased burden, but little value upon which it was spent.

The centrepiece of this budget is clearly three or four major new taxes. The most obvious one is the big new tax on mining to raise billions and billions of dollars. This is not just a tax on big multinational corporations, as the government would try to pretend. It is not even just a tax that will affect the super funds and mum and dad investors. All of those are also being hurt. Indeed, in the very first week we saw something like $15 billion wiped off the value of Australia’s superannuation funds as a direct result of Labor’s big new tax. They claim they are the friends of superannuation. They have their acolytes out there boasting about and welcoming some kind of additional tax on employers so that there can be better superannuation savings. But, at the same time, they are imposing taxes which tear away at the investments of individuals for their retirement and severely damage the superannuation funds.

But this great big new tax affects us also in everything else that we do. Our electricity prices will be higher because coal and gas will be more expensive. Our houses will be more expensive to build because bricks and cement will be more expensive. Our food will be more expensive because the fertiliser and the farm input costs all go up as a result of Labor’s big new tax on mining. So this is like so many other Labor taxes: a tax on ordinary Australians. It is a tax on the household budget. It is not just a tax on Rio Tinto and BHP and other large corporations; it is a tax on pensioners, it is a tax on Australian families and will badly damage their day-to-day budget.

The second tax, which I have already mentioned, is the big new superannuation guarantee levy, which will add substantially to the cost of all Australian employers, including hundreds of thousands of employers who are not going to get any tax cuts. The government has been boasting about the fact that they are offering some small taxation concessions for company tax to small business. But only about 12 per cent of small businesses pay company tax. And yet all of them who have employees are going to have to pay the new superannuation tax.

Of course, the third big Labor tax that is lurking around like a redback in an outback dunny is Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. One minute it is gone, the next minute it is back. We do know there is funding in the budget to keep the bureaucracy rolling over, and everyone knows that in reality, after they have endured all of this taxation splurge, there is still more that Labor has in its mind. No-one can ever escape those taxes; they are going to cost jobs and investment and prosperity all over the country, and that is especially going to be in regional Australia because so many of these industries that are going to cop the big new taxation regime are employing people outside of the capital cities.

But in spite of all these new taxes, we still have a deficit this year in the budget of almost $41 billion—the second-highest deficit since World War II, when our nation was mobilised to fight a rather expensive war on two fronts. Australia had a lot to show for the deficits in the 1940s: we won a war, we secured our peace. But I do not think the people of Australia are going to march on Anzac Days in the future to commemorate the construction in 2009-10 of school halls and dodgy roof insulation. I do not think they are going to be as joyous about the building up of a huge deficit for wasteful government programs as they were when our country was at war.

If you want to look at the centrepieces of the expenditure side of this budget, look no further than the $1 billion for the cost overruns on the school computer program, the extra $1 billion for managing asylum seekers and the $1 billion to undo the insulation scheme. The latter is an extraordinary program—$1.4 billion to put insulation in people’s roofs and now $1 billion to take it out. It reminds me a bit of the old Whitlam RED scheme—dig the hole and then pay somebody else to fill it up. That is what we have in this particular instance—$1.4 billion to put insulation in people’s roofs and $1 billion to take it out. And it is all on the budget deficit; it all adds to the budget deficit, and it will all have to be paid off.

The great honour of the Rudd Labor government, its great legacy for the people of Australia, is that it has delivered the two biggest peacetime budget deficits in our nation’s history. That is the record of the Rudd Labor government. The fiscal conservative, the person who said on television screens before the last election that he was going to balance the budget, that he believed in balanced budgets, has delivered the two biggest budget deficits in our nation’s history. I heard last night that Visa had sponsored Labor’s budget party in Parliament House—probably an appropriate choice of sponsor because another $41 billion has gone on the Australian government’s Visa card. In this instance, the Australian people have to pay it all back.

The Treasurer last night told us that the cards were all going to fall into place and that it was all being done under the highest standards of responsible economic management. Yet he is basing this budget on the predictions that we will have the best terms of trade our country has seen for 60 years, that our exports will grow every year, that there will be substantial investment growth, of something like 20 per cent a year, that unemployment will fall and that inflation will not go above 2½ per cent. This is simply not credible. All that is supposedly going to lead to a $1 billion surplus in three years time. Well, as we heard in question time today, Labor cannot keep budgets within tens of billions of dollars, so anyone who believes there will be a surplus of $1 billion in three year’s time simply has not been watching Labor in government.

One other point that I find very interesting is that the government is predicting that the new excise slug on cigarettes will result in fewer people smoking. That is the excuse for this big new tax. So a 25 per cent increase in the excise on smoking is going to reduce smoking; however, a 40 per cent tax on mining is going to increase, to boost, mining expenditure! That is simply not logical.

The finance minister came in today and said—and he said it once previously—that this budget kills stone-dead the coalition’s debt and deficit argument. He is wrong, by $100 million a day. Every day, with this budget and the budgets that are to follow, Labor will be out in the marketplace borrowing $100 million from the Chinese, from the Middle East, from Europe and from Australians. The government will be competing with business and with homeowners for money to pay for their deficits. As a result, there will also be upward pressure on interest rates. So I assure the finance minister that the coalition’s debt and deficit argument is not stone-dead—it is well and truly alive, and it is alive by $100 million every day. Every day we wait for a change of government we will be $100 million poorer as a nation.

Labor’s previous budgets did not stand the test of time. None of them fulfilled their promises. This time, we are being asked to believe it will be third time lucky. That is simply not going to happen. Labor’s adherence to the Charter of Budget Honesty is in theory only. The Prime Minister’s claim to be an economic conservative is simply empty. This is a big-taxing, big-spending government. They have learnt nothing from the damage they have inflicted on the Australian economy over the last couple of years. The Australian people are going to continue to pay $100 million every day to pay for the debt in the budget that has been brought down and for Labor’s plans for the future. This is not a responsible government. They have lost the right to be the managers of the Australian economy. (Time expired)

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