Milton Dick (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It might be a new year, but this is not a new government that has learned anything over the Christmas break. Here we have before us the same hypocritical, short-sighted, small-minded, trickle-down-economics-preaching government that the Australian people have had to put up with for almost five years now. It is a government that's not concerned with helping families, a government that's not concerned with helping pensioners and a government that's not concerned with helping students but a government that is hell-bent on ramming through unaffordable, ill-conceived and unrequired tax cuts to billionaires and the big banks, whilst everyday Australian families see their childcare support payments cut, their school funding cut, assistance for pensioners cut and support for university students cut. This government's credibility is wafer thin at best.

When it comes to the proposed personal tax cuts, as put forward by the member for Forde just a few moments ago, Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson said, 'Here we go again, a government lagging in the polls looks set to leave behind a poison pill,' and that the Turnbull government's 'battlers budget' risks undermining economic stability. We've also heard from global ratings agency Standard & Poor's, which maintained its 'negative outlook' on Australia and warned there was still 'significant uncertainty' over the budget's return to surplus and that the government position was still too risky to justify tax cuts. Not even the Prime Minister seemed sure of the government's plan when yesterday we saw him get into a pickle on the ABC's Insiders program, not seeming to understand that the government's plan to hit low- and middle-income earners with a Medicare levy increase will actually result in an increase in personal tax. So, while the Prime Minister and the Treasurer dangle income tax rhetoric at every opportunity, their actions will actually see seven million Australians worse off by $1.7 billion per year. We have also seen in the past few weeks the Prime Minister and the Treasurer crowing their three-word slogan 'jobs and growth', but scratch the surface and it's easy to see that the government have failed as economic managers and, with $65 billion worth of tax handouts to big businesses, they continue to fail the Australian people.

I want to put some facts on the table. We've got a government that has delivered an all-time high of $516.9 billion in government debt. Remember the debt and deficit emergency and the debt trucks? Let's put that into perspective. With $516.9 billion in government debt, it's gone up, not down, over the last five years. It has gone up by an incredible $243 billion since the 2013 election and in the government's own midyear economic forecast was projected to still climb, to $583 billion in 2021. We have a budget deficit of $20 billion, up from a forecast $15 billion when the Treasurer delivered his first budget, and a real-time loss of wages to Australian workers with the cuts to penalty rates on 1 July. The government is overseeing record low growth and overseeing a 75-year high for inequality. So let's not have any more talk that the coalition are good economic managers. Debt is up. Inequality is up. That's what we're seeing time and time again. This is not a government of jobs and growth. It is a government that is out of touch.

So what's the government's answer? The only trickle-down solution they've got is to give an unwarranted $65 billion tax cut to the big banks and big businesses. That's right. Go out into the member's electorate and say, 'Do you support big banks and multinationals getting tax cuts at the expense of investing in education and health services?' I know what the answer is in my community. Last year, company profits rose by more than 30 per cent while wages only rose by 1.5 per cent, leaving the share of wages in national income at 51.5 per cent, the equal lowest level since the 1960s.

Don't take my word for it. Even the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, is on the record as saying Australia's economy is suffering a crisis in wage growth. The government is effectively sending the wages of working Australians backwards whilst giving handouts to the companies which employ them and which are making record profits. It's no wonder that my local paper today highlighted the fact that we are at an all-time high when it comes to payday lenders in this country, because people simply cannot pay their bills. Over 600,000 households rely on those payday loans and 1.8 million households are now declared financially distressed. This government's record, when it comes to delivering real wage growth and when it comes to delivering the spoils of economic growth, is found to be wanting. The community that I represent and communities right across Australia deserve much better than the trickle-down economics that this government is delivering.

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