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

I want to start with a question to all those watching or listening to this today. Do you feel better off or worse off than a year ago? As I talk to people around Australia, I ask this question wherever I go and I get a very consistent answer. Whether it's in a capital city, our regions, in the suburbs, you name it—over in the west, here in the east—I hear the same thing. 'No,' they say, 'I feel worse off.'

The facts on this are stark. An average Australian family with a mortgage is wearing additional costs now, versus a year ago, of $25,000 a year for a typical family. That's higher mortgage payments. That's higher grocery bills. That's higher energy prices—and they are set to get higher under the government's own numbers in their budget. Those costs are set to get higher. The truth is that there is real pain out there, and there is real pain out there because we have higher core inflation than any G7 country in the world, at 6.6 per cent core inflation. The UK is at 6.2 per cent, the US at 5.6, Canada at 4.3, the euro area at 5.7 and so on. Australia is top of the pops, but it's not the top of the pops you want to be, because it represents enormous pain to Australians.

Only a couple of weeks ago, I was in Goulburn, where I live, talking to a young couple there. Nicole and Dougie have two kids. They recently bought a home. They're luckier than many Australians because they, being in a regional area, paid a little bit less for their home than the average, but they're still paying $890 a month more than they were a year ago. Finding that is incredibly hard. In fact, in Nicole and Dougie's case, Nicole is looking at the prospect of having to go back to work earlier than she had hoped, which means spending less time with her second child.

These are the real decisions that Australians are making right across this great country. We saw in the employment numbers that came out only last week that Australians are having to work harder to make ends meet. They're working more hours in the day and the week than they were, because that is the only way they can pay for the necessities of their lives. You would have thought in that context this government would have brought down a budget that fought inflation first—that treated fighting inflation as the one thing this budget could have done which would have helped every single Australian. It would have united us in saying, 'Thank you for a budget that is going to help every one of us, not divide us between those who are going to benefit from the budget and those who aren't.'

Sadly, in this budget we saw long lists of the forgotten Australians who were hurt—the young families like Nicole and Dougie, who have seen no help from this budget, because there is no end to this inflation that is hurting them so much. For small businesses, no end is in sight. They're seeing down-trading of their customers and their costs escalating at the same time, and just trying to hold the show together is a battle every single day. We saw the example of Darren Pilcher on the Sunshine Coast just last week. He was a great example—a terrible example, really—of what small businesses are having to do to survive. In his case, it is just extra hours in the day that he simply doesn't have in his cafe on the beautiful Sunshine Coast. The biggest losers in this budget, though, are those hardworking Australians who want to get ahead. They are the backbone of this country. The people who run the small businesses, the truckies, the tradies, the young families with a mortgage trying to get ahead, and the farmers are all being whacked in this budget with higher inflation and higher taxes.

Since the budget, those opposite have been very keen to talk about middle Australia. But I tell you when the Treasurer stood up at the dispatch box there on budget night there wasn't a mention of middle Australia. There was no mention of middle Australia in the budget. It was only in the talking points the day after, when they realised, after interview after interview that night, that they'd forgotten about middle Australia. 'Oh my gosh. Forgotten about middle Australia—how could we have forgotten?' They stuck them in the talking points.

There's a reason they took this approach. The Treasurer is not a doctor of economics. Many Australians think he's a doctor of economics. There's a doctor of economics just across on the other side; he's not one of those. He is a doctor of spin. That's all he is. So, when he realised the budget was no good on the economics, he went to the spin, and we saw the true doctor at work—the spin doctor that is the Treasurer. We wish we had a doctor of economics, but he's been consigned to a lowly role.

Meanwhile, we get this budget. This budget featured a lot of big stuff. The first big thing it featured was big spending. What we saw in this budget was an extra $185 billion of spin since those opposite came into government. It's simple: you can just go to the table. It's there. This is what the spending is now; compare it with what it was when they came into government—$185 billion. That's their definition of restraint. That's what the Treasurer calls restraint—an extra $185 billion is restraint! We do have an economist here who could tell us what restraint looks like, but it's not $185 billion of extra spending.

Worse—and this is in the table of truth that Chris Richardson always talks about that compares the spending and the savings of policy initiatives—he is spending two dollars for every one dollar he is saving. So this is a budget that is not fiscally responsible. Indeed, a whole range of economists and others, on budget night and since, have said exactly that. We heard Rich Insight's director Chris Richardson say:

I had thought that the Reserve Bank was done and dusted but this has notably raised the chance that they will do another swing of the baseball bat.

Betashares' chief economist David Bassanese called the budget 'unambiguously expansionary'. Just now I read an article in which Richard Yetsenga, the chief economist of ANZ, said we should get used to interest rates being high as no easing is coming any time soon. This is what others are saying in response to the budget.

It is a budget that is not only big spending but also big taxing, because that's how Labor do it. They spend the money and then they hit you with inflation and taxes. It's not a new formula; it's a very old formula. What are the taxes? Taxes on superannuation, taxes on franking credits, taxes on truckies, taxes on farmers, taxes on everyone earning an income through the low- to middle-income tax offset disappearing and bracket creep, taxes on cigarettes, taxes on gas—you name it. There is nothing the Treasurer can see that he doesn't want to tax, and that's exactly what we saw in this budget.

That is why we support a 23.9 per cent limit on the tax-to-GDP ratio. It's a sensible approach that says to Australians: 'You can trust this government is not going to spend all your money and is not going to take more from you. It gives you the incentive to get out there and work hard every day.' That is what Australians want to do to make their families better off and give themselves a chance to get ahead. That's what they want to see.

We also saw in this budget not just big spending and big taxing but big government at work. It's a heavy-handed government with industrial relations changes that are going to hamstring businesses to get on and do what they do, which is sell their products and services to Australians and to the world that benefit all of us. We've seen gas regulation driving out investment in this country. We are seeing a carbon tax being put in place. We had a review handed down to make life easier for financial planners to advise Australians on how to make investments, and the Assistant Treasurer has buried it, because they believe in bigger government and they believe that the role of government is to do everything for you, rather than let Australians get on and do what they do best in making their lives better and conditions better for their families.

This is a big-spending, big-taxing government focused on a big Australia. It is the wrong answer for Australia.

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