Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This bill is very well named. Indeed, it is quite deliberately named the Labor 2013-14 Budget Savings (Measures No. 1) Bill, because, despite being introduced by a coalition Treasurer, it is very much a Labor bill. It is a Labor bill because it gives effect to a commitment made on 14 May 2013 by the then Treasurer, the member for Lilley. In his final budget as Treasurer, the member for Lilley committed the then Labor government to the deferral of a second round of personal income tax cuts, a measure that was estimated at the time to save $1.5 billion over the forward estimates. The tax cuts were to be unwound because their original purpose—to compensate taxpayers for the movement of a carbon price from a fixed to a floating price—was no longer necessary. This was because the floating carbon price forward estimate from 1 July 2015 was revised significantly downwards, from $29 to $12 a tonne, a figure below even the fixed price that taxpayers were already paying.

However, Labor happily banked the $1.5 billion saving to prop up their flagging budget bottom line. But the people of Australia well remember the chaos and dysfunction of the dying days of the Labor government in 2013. It will therefore not be a surprise that Labor did not follow through with what it said it would do at the time. The legislation was not unwound. The weakened, disorganised, chaotic government of the day could not sufficiently get its act together to introduce legislation giving effect to savings in its own budget. So, this bill is as welcomed as it is late. We should have been debating this bill in this House, in this session, two years ago. However, whether by incompetence or by design, Labor failed to deliver. So, yet again, it is left to the coalition to repair Labor's budget mess. Members opposite should be lining up to support this bill. After all, it fulfils the intention of the 2013 Labor budget.

The member for Lilley should certainly be supporting it, and so should all those opposite who supported him to be Treasurer for all those years. The member for Lilley will, I am sure, also be enthusiastic in his support for this bill because it charts a sustainable path back to surplus. We all know that the member for Lilley liked to talk about budget surpluses—so much so, he had a persistent habit of announcing budget surpluses that failed to materialise. But, surplus or not, printing and distribution companies were kept in business producing glossy brochures proclaiming his budget-conjuring genius. But perhaps I am too harsh on the member for Lilley. He did make a very good point during his budget speech back in 2011 when he remarked:

... meandering back to surplus would compound the pressures in our economy and push up the cost of living for pensioners and working people.

Fine words from the then Treasurer. Unfortunately we know that, in six budgets, he never quite led Australia back to surplus—meandering or otherwise.

And we must also not forget that not only did Labor promise this measure in their final budget; they also took it to the last election as an election promise. In the time that has elapsed since 2013, the cost to the budget of not passing this measure has increased over the forward estimates. The explanatory notes to this bill, prepared following the 2014-15 budget, identify that the cost has now risen from $1.5 billion to $2.2 billion in the period to 30 June 2018. It will now have risen further.

So here is an opportunity for Labor to finally make good on their commitment to budget responsibility and to make good on their own election commitment. They could not do it in government but now, finally, they have an opportunity to make good on their rhetoric and support a government that it is serious about getting our country back to surplus. Sadly, I have my doubts about the opposition's commitment to budget repair. After all, this is an opposition which has combined with their old friends the Greens in the Senate to block so many of the government's savings measures necessary to get Australia's finances back on track.

Mr Danby interjecting—

There is an interjection about the opposition's friends the Greens. Sorry, they were not only their friends; they formed a coalition government with them in the last parliament. They are now an opposition who have favoured politics and partisanship over responsible economic management. So much so, we have seen the ludicrous scenario of a Labor opposition voting against $5 billion worth of budget savings measures proposed by Labor themselves when they were in government. They are voting against their own budget savings measures! Such obstructionism may be in Labor's short-term political interests but it is not in the interests of Australia's long-term financial sustainability. It is time for Labor to be responsible—hard as that may be. It is time for them to put their own interests aside and to join with the government to back a bill that enacts savings measures supported in principle by both sides of the House.

I commend the bill to the House.

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