Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We all heard it before the election. Australians all heard it before the election. Life was going to be cheaper under Labor. We heard before the election that mortgages were going to be cheaper. And what did we get? We got six consecutive increases in the cash rate, to 2.85 per cent, and we know it's going higher. Before the election, they promised lower cost of living, and what did we get? We got inflation going above seven per cent, and the Reserve Bank says it's on its way to eight per cent. Before the election, we heard that electricity prices were going to be lower, a $275 reduction. And what did we get? Ninety-seven times before the election we heard they were going to be cheaper, but, since then, the Prime Minister has been asked 28 times—including twice more today—if he will commit to the $275 reduction, and each time he has refused to recommit.

This is a Labor government that made election promises it is happy to abandon and give away, despite the fact that the greatest pressure all Australians are facing right now, whether it's businesses or households, is cost pressures. The big opportunity Labor had to deal with this was in the budget. But we have a Treasurer whose focus as a Treasurer is on doom, gloom, forecasting and commentary. This is a Treasurer that wouldn't know a plan if he fell over it. What we got in the budget, instead, in October, was a complete flop. There is no other way to describe it.

He promised us that he was going to paint a picture. We were all expecting something elaborate—a Picasso or maybe something more local, like Tom Roberts. Instead, we got a singer. We got Taylor Swift. We got a blank space. We got absolutely nothing out of this budget. We got something that sank to the bottom of the ocean within a couple of days. The Treasurer has chosen, on a now famous occasion, to mishear questions about the budget. No-one bothers to ask him questions about the budget anymore, because he mishears them anyway. The truth is that I would be mishearing questions about that budget if I had handed it down, because it was absolutely hopeless!

Instead of a comprehensive plan to consolidate the strong economic position and the strong budget that the Treasurer inherited, we got growing deficits and no medium-term fiscal strategies. They have given up on budget balance. They've given it away. It's gone! For the first time since the Charter of Budget Honesty was put in place, there is no commitment to budget balance. They have absolutely given up the ghost.

Instead of delivering economic growth, which is what we wanted to see, we have $142 billion of extra taxes in the budget. Compared to the March budget, if you take the forwards over the four years, there are $142 billion of extra taxes—and right at the heart of that is that sneaky thief in the night, bracket creep, that those opposite want to keep. They want taxes going up, automatically, every year.

Instead of a productivity agenda we got more red tape and industrial relations chaos. Instead of managing spending, we got an extra $115 billion of spending in this budget. The Treasurer himself has admitted: with more spending comes higher interest rates. He said it. The member for Parramatta, over there, knows this. Any economist knows it: more spending; higher interest rates. We've even heard an economist to Julia Gillard, Stephen Koukoulas, make this very clear.

See this speech in context