Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

They drop off. You can just see the wry smile from some of the colleagues, who quite like the idea of Treasurer Hockey underperforming. But what I say to those colleagues is that you are all responsible for this budget. Everyone who sits on the front bench here and in the cabinet nodded eagerly when the Treasurer and the Prime Minister said they wanted a GP tax, $100,000 degrees and pension cuts. You all nodded your head. You all signed off on it. It is not just their names on it; it is all of your names on it. The member for Wentworth, the member for Curtin—all of the colleagues are responsible for this budget.

There could not be a worse time for this incompetence, division and chaos, when we do have very substantial challenges in our economy and in our society. The member for McMillan was right to say that revenue is down. There are holes in our tax system. It beggars belief that they would reopen one of them at the same time as they talk about holes in the revenue, but that is the truth. The revenue is down since Howard and Costello, and that is a challenge that we need to address. There is more than one way to skin a cat, though, I think we would say about that. The way they are going about it—asking the most vulnerable people in Australia to fix the budget, while everyone else gets tax breaks and gets off scot-free—is really not the way forward. For a country that cherishes the fair go, that is not the way you go about this really important task.

We will be guided, as we always are when it comes to the budget, by what is right for Australia, what is right for the broad mass of the Australian people—not one or two people in the economy, but the economy in the broadest sense. We want more people to participate in this remarkable quarter-century run of growth that we have had in Australia. Australia is in the midst of one of the most extraordinary periods of growth in the modern economic history of the planet, and we want more and more people hooked up to the opportunities that that brings. Our problem with the budget is that it says: 'We want two Australias. We want two tiers of Australia, with one group, the most vulnerable group, asked to do the heaviest lifting and another group that gets all the gains from economic growth in this country.' That is not what we want. We want a burden fairly shared. We cherish, like the Australian people, the fair go in this country. For as long as the fair go lives and breathes in this country, the Australian people will reject a budget like this. And, for as long as there is breath in the Australian Labor Party, we will stand up for the people who are under attack in this budget. We had a record of savings in the former government—$180 billion worth of savings. We have also ticked off on $20 billion of savings in the current budget. So we are up for a conversation about belt-tightening. So are the Australian people, but they will not cop a budget which is as fundamentally unfair as this one.

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