Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation) Share this | Hansard source

This 2017 budget is one that delivers for all Australians—for the Australians living in the suburbs and living in our regional centres; for the Australians who work in small businesses or who are salaried, who battle every day to put food on the table, to put a roof over their head and to buy a house. Every one of those mainstream Australians is a beneficiary of this budget.

The previous speaker was quite right: this is not a Labor budget, because it does not indulge in the glib class warfare of those opposite. We do not believe in that. We believe in a pragmatic approach where we want to create opportunities for every Australian to have a crack, to have a fair go. That is what fairness is actually all about. In that spirit, it is a comprehensive plan that guarantees the essentials that Australians rely on in order to capture those opportunities.

In my portfolio areas, this budget is an absolutely once-in-a-generation budget, with a $75 billion infrastructure commitment. Central to that is a $10 billion National Rail Program in which we will consider projects like AdeLINK; the Tullamarine rail link; Cross River Rail, in Brisbane; the Western Sydney rail link, which I will come back to in a moment; and the Brisbane Metro. On all of those projects, we want to work closely with state governments to shape the best possible projects and deliver the best outcomes, playing an active role as a government alongside our state and local government partners. Central to this is our new Infrastructure and Project Financing Agency, which will help us to make those right choices, the right investments, delivering more bang for the taxpayers' buck. Within that agency, we are recruiting commercial people with the experience to make active, effective, high-impact investments.

In Western Australia we are investing in a $2.3 billion jobs and infrastructure package with the state government, with over a billion dollars to be jointly allocated to future Metronet projects in Perth. This offers the opportunity for the outer suburbs of Perth in particular to better connect to the rest of the city. That package also strongly aligns with our Smart Cities agenda, and we will continue to work with the Western Australian government, the state, on opportunities to deliver a city deal.

In Victoria, we will make a $1 billion fund available for regional rail and other infrastructure projects, including $30 million to develop a business case for a rail link to Melbourne airport at Tullamarine—sadly, a project which the state government until now has ignored. A new, $500 million, Victorian regional rail fund will include $100 million to upgrade the Geelong rail line. This is a real focus on these satellite cities around our capitals, better connecting them and making sure we can grow them as major job centres. Alongside that is $100 million for our north-east rail upgrades in Victoria.

In Queensland, the government is using $844 million in savings to reinvest in critical infrastructure projects in the state.

Closer to home for me, in my electorate of Hume, the budget provides over $5 billion to build a new airport for Western Sydney at Badgerys Creek, creating 20,000 direct jobs in the early 2020s and 60,000 in the long term. We know that is just the beginning, because if we look around the world we see that airports are magnets for jobs. There are no faster growing areas in most cities of the world now than their airports. This is an extraordinary opportunity for Western Sydney to have more jobs closer to home. A genuine 30-minute city is within reach through the work we are doing in Western Sydney.

The Western Sydney City Deal will harness the economic opportunity created by the airport. We were absolutely delighted, only a few days ago, to be in Western Sydney to announce that the first anchor tenant for the Badgerys Creek airport—around the Badgerys Creek airport—will be Northrop-Grumman, which is a defence contractor, a major player, with high-quality jobs. It is setting up a centre in Western Sydney, which ultimately will be based around Badgerys Creek as well as having a presence at Richmond.

Delivering the right mix of housing in the right places will be absolutely critical for the population growth we are seeing, and will continue to see, across this dynamic, fast-growing region. Of course, Western Sydney will be a beneficiary of the Treasurer's very comprehensive housing package. Unlike Labor, which wants to take a chainsaw to the housing market with its single focus on taxing more—and how taxing more was ever going to be a solution to the housing market problems we are seeing in Melbourne and Sydney is beyond me—we are bringing to the table a comprehensive set of initiatives that we think will deal with the underlying issue over both the shorter term and the longer term. This package includes three key areas. The first and most important is unlocking supply in the right places. Any economist will tell you that our fundamental problem in housing, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, has been a lack of supply. When the Labor New South Wales state government declared that Sydney was shut in the early 2000s we saw a complete failure of housing supply response to fast-growing population demand. Sydney should have been building about 35,000 houses a year, and when we look back between 2004 and 2014 we see it built less than half of those—17,000 houses a year. No wonder we have an enormous backlog in demand for housing supply in Sydney, and we have seen similar dynamics in Melbourne.

The government will establish a $1 billion National Housing Infrastructure Facility to fund the infrastructure needed to unlock development, particularly around job centres and transport hubs, and that funding will be rolled out in new micro city deals, agreements that apply the City Deal model of integrated planning across state, federal and local government to get more houses in the right places connected to jobs and connected to transport.

The budget also includes funding for a specific Western Sydney housing supply package and will tie funding to planning and zoning reform, supporting state and local governments to cut red tape and the delays that hold back that all important housing supply.

That is supply. The second area is creating the right incentives around the housing market. We are focused on improving opportunities in the housing market for all Australians, both younger and older. At the younger end, through the First Home Super Saver Scheme, Australians will be able to salary sacrifice contributions of up to $15,000 a year and $30,000 in total within existing contribution caps. At the older end of the scale, we are supporting older Australians who want to downsize. From 1 July next year, people 65 years and older will be allowed to make a special non-concessional contribution into superannuation of up to $300,000 from the proceeds of selling their home. Important in creating the right incentives, we will make changes to foreign investor rules to make sure that more homes are available for Australians and particularly young first home buyers trying to get into the market.

The third area we are focused on in this package is strengthening assistance for social housing and homelessness, making sure that the vulnerable have a roof over their heads. This has to be a priority. We will work with state and local governments to ensure that we have stronger tailored agreements around homelessness and social housing. We have committed $375 million to provide certainty to frontline services that help Australians who are homeless or who are at risk of becoming homeless. On top of that, a national housing, finance and investment corporation will be established to administer an affordable housing bond aggregator. This is about making sure that there is more capital available at a low cost to get these crucial houses in for people who are most vulnerable.

On the other side of my portfolio—in digital and IT—this government not only is investing in physical infrastructure in cities and infrastructure portfolios but also has invested in its digital infrastructure in this budget. We have put $200 million into my portfolio to increase the capability of government to deliver more effective programs and services. That includes $70 million for the second stage of our Digital Transformation Agenda and $130 million over the forward estimates to improve our data driven capability. These projects include things like Tell Us Once—a single notification platform. Tell Us Once allows Australians to go on to government websites and tell us about updates to their address and circumstances and not have to tell every department the same thing time and time again. These projects also include things like notifications so that we better engage with citizens and businesses about where they are at, simpler payment platforms and a federated data exchange. This is so that, as I said, we can fulfil some of these simplifying projects that make it easier for citizens and businesses to deal with governments.

The projects will build on the new myGov version that was delivered just this week by the Department of Human Services and the ATO, along with the DTA, as well as the ongoing GovPass Program. To put it simply: this will allow all Australians, if they choose, to update their details once and to logon once to find any service they need simply and quickly. The investments are targeted and effective and are already delivering real benefits.

Turning to my electorate of Hume, in 2017-18 alone the federal government will invest almost $640 million in Hume road and bridge projects. This is an extraordinary amount. We have confirmed our $50 million towards the upgrade of Appin Road. The first of that money will be spent this year. The planning has to be right and, of course, will be delivered by the state government. It is an important project as part of that broader package of well over half a billion dollars.

In addition to that, the budget delivers great opportunities for small businesses in Hume, including initiatives like extending the instant asset write-off for small businesses—a very popular way of investing more in the electorate. I see that farmers, small-business people and tradies have applied this instant asset write-off to great effect. That is also generating enormous activity from service providers around the electorate. Robert Mills, who owns and operates Mount Annan Quality Meat, which is a great butcher's in the north of my electorate that employs eight people, said the tax breaks would have an immediate effect. As well as that, we are reinstating financial assistance grants. Councils in my electorate have done very well in recent years from a range of different programs, and this will help them to continue to meet their needs.

In health and education, we have seen great commitments to spending in my electorate. Across Australia we have put an extra $2.4 billion into assurance of Medicare for the next four years. We have also seen in recent years a strong increase in bulk-billing rates. For Hume in 2015-16, the bulk-billing rate was 88 per cent. Almost 90 per cent of visits to the doctor were bulk-billed. I note the member for Macarthur was here a few moments ago. He would be interested to know that the national bulk-billing rate was, under Labor, just over 82 per cent—82.2 per cent. It is now 85.4 per cent and continues to increase.

The budget confirms the government's commitment to reining in energy costs and ensuring reliable supply, with initiatives like the one-off energy assistance payment this year of $75 for single recipients and $125 for couples. On the education side we are seeing very significant commitments. In my electorate of Hume, every one of Hume's 79 schools will receive significant increases in funding. For instance, the funding will grow for the Catholic education schools, with the average amount per student rising from its current $8,780 to $12,562. That is true. Those increases are in every school—every Catholic school as well as every government and independent school—throughout the electorate of Hume. In fact, the total increase in federal government funding for schools in Hume over the next 10 years sits at $282 million.

Hume is a diverse electorate. The benefits to the good people of Hume, those mainstream Australians who, as I say, run small businesses and work in businesses, schools and hospitals around my electorate, of this budget are real and tangible. They will be enabled. They will be in a position to capture those great opportunities that Australians have always been offered over two centuries since the first European settlement. This is a wonderful country, and Hume is benefiting from a great budget.

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