Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

What a dreadful and disappointing budget was handed down by this government on 13 May. It is a dreadful and disappointing budget because it is filled with lies and broken promises, and it has been so seen by the people of Australia right across the country. Parents, young people, pensioners—anyone that uses the services the government provides can see now what they got when they elected the Abbott government in September last year. Just as the bunting around polling booths said, 'He wins, you lose,' now Australians can see just how right that prediction was from the Australian Labor Party. Tony Abbott did win the election and Australians lost in so many ways.

We have seen from the way in which this government has tried to explain their budget to the Australian people a continuation of their empty slogans and their misrepresentations and misleading statements about the true state of the Australian budget, about the true state of the Australian economy, about the true state of our national finances. I could start by pointing to the way in which this government is wanting the comparison in their budget papers not to be, as it should be, with the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the document written on the eve of the election by the secretary of the Treasury and the secretary of the Department of Finance, which is the proper comparison, but rather with the false document prepared by this government which they published as the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, a mid-year economic and fiscal outlook in which they chose to give to the Reserve Bank of Australia $8.8 billion that the Reserve Bank of Australia had not asked for and a mid-year economic and fiscal outlook in which they chose to add to the budget deficit by almost doubling it. They achieved that by removing assumptions, removing spending caps and changing the way in which the figures are produced. It is nothing to do with Labor; this is their Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, not Labor's. And it produced their other false figure of the $667 billion they have been quoting. I am sure we heard much of this from the member for Moore, who I heard reciting some of the government's lines in the speech which immediately preceded mine. Of course, that is another false figure. It is a figure that the government has produced solely for political purposes, because this is a government that can do nothing but play politics with every single aspect of the administration of the Commonwealth. It is a government which can do nothing but play politics.

This false figure of $660 billion which the government likes to tout is a figure that is said to be the level of the deficit in 2023. They never mention it is in 2023—10 years time. Of course, one would only get to it if the governments between now, 2014, and 2023 were asleep at the wheel. Perhaps this government is planning on being asleep at the wheel. There is no other way that we would get to $660 billion other than by successive governments—not merely the current short-lived government of Tony Abbott but every government between now and then—ignoring any issues about spending and ignoring, in particular, the revenue side of the budget.

What we have had from the government in this budget is not merely the falsity of their pretending that they are doing something about the deficit—and they are pretending, because in their budget papers we do not return to a surplus earlier than predicted by the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of the Department of Finance in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. We return one year later. That is how much of an effort this government is making to deal with deficits. There is no 'debt and deficit disaster' in Australia—not a jot of it. There are issues about the collection of revenue in Australia. These issues have been building for many years and they are issues which we saw writ large over the course of the six years of Labor government, because it is the case that, over the last 21 years of Labor's budgets, all of them produced a lower tax to GDP ratio, under 22 per cent, than any of the Howard government budgets—any of the budgets over the 11½ years of the Howard government.

This is why at every turn you can see—and Australians are beginning to understand—the falsity of the approach to the economy that is represented by the Abbott government's budget, the falsity of their three-word slogans and the falsity of their slogan about a debt and deficit disaster, when there is nothing of the kind. You could only say that if you were prepared to wholly ignore the fact that we have continuing growth in Australia. We had continuing growth right through the global financial crisis, which of course the Liberals never want to mention. This is the global financial crisis that the Rudd and Gillard governments managed Australia through, with great economic skill and sound economic management. We had continuing growth, relatively low unemployment and, compared to the whole of the rest of the Western world, the whole of the OECD, relatively low debt to GDP ratio—about a seventh of the OECD average.

The government does not want to state the true picture to the Australian people. The government never wants to state the true picture to the Australian people. It wants to pretend that it kept its promises to the Australian people. What a nonsense! And the Australian people have seen through that. They have seen through it because they remember that, before the election, Tony Abbott and his ministers said that there would be no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no new taxes, no cuts to the ABC—and no change to pensions; I almost forgot. What have we seen? This is just a selection of the false promises that were made before the election by Tony Abbott—

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