Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The opening question, of course, is: where is the Treasurer? It's a fair question. The previous minister, I'll acknowledge, is the first Labor minister to sit the whole way through on this. I've sat in on a number of these consideration in detail processes. It's become the norm for Labor not to send their ministers in and for the junior ministers and the MPs to not even acknowledge the questions that are being asked of them, let alone attempt to answer them, but simply read pre-prepared statements.

I want to go to a couple of statements from the Prime Minister here. This is from Anthony Albanese, our Prime Minister:

… we do need to restore faith in our political system. We need to make sure that there is transparency, accountability and integrity.

That is our Prime Minister.

The Australian people deserve accountability and transparency, not secrecy.

That is our Prime Minister. Further, and very appropriately to this process, the Prime Minister promised the Australian people that a government he led would expose itself to 'those checks and balances that are so important'. Deputy Speaker, I would put it to you that consideration in detail is one of the most important checks and balances we have in the parliamentary process. The hypocrisy could not be more on display when they hide behind this process. Second question: does the Treasurer accept this low standard, and should the Australian people expect it to continue? I think, by his absence, we have ourselves an answer. This could not stand in starker contrast to the previous government. In the midst of the pandemic, the then Minister for Health and Aged Care, Greg Hunt, sat there, took questions and answered them.

Going back to that time, the most recent Roy Morgan business confidence report shows that business confidence hasn't been this low for this long since the dark days of that pandemic. Business confidence is now 21.9 points below the long-term average of 112.2, and 62 per cent of respondents expect bad times for the economy over the next year. Does the Treasurer accept responsibility for these low levels of business confidence? Does he accept that this budget has failed to inspire confidence in the business community? Having seen this strong rebuke of his budget by the business community, what changes to his budget would he now make if he had his time again?

In preparation for the delivery of this budget, the Treasurer pledged to 'remake capitalism'. Is this budget a part of that work, or is the job now done? It's been, apparently, a very good 10 months. Is this as good as it gets? Given the failure of this budget to turn around Australia's inflation crisis and the continued need for the RBA to raise interest rates, does the Treasurer now acknowledge it was a mistake to try and reinvent the wheel before he'd learned how to turn it? Will the Treasurer now turn his focus away from remaking capitalism to fighting inflation, which is the challenge of the day?

Prior to the election and in the lead-up to the budget, the Treasurer committed to no tax hikes and stated that he had no plans to increase taxes to Australians. Given the introduction of the farmers tax and the increase to the truckies tax in this budget, was the Treasurer deliberately misleading the Australian people when he made these statements, or was the deception accidental? Prior to the election and in the lead-up to the budget, the Treasurer stated that claims they would increase taxes were just a 'scare campaign'. Does the Treasurer now accept that these were statements of fact and that Labor has indeed increased taxes? The Treasurer's repeatedly spoken of fiscal restraint in this budget and yet it confirms government spending will increase by $185 billion. Relative government spending is now higher than it was pre-pandemic. How does the Treasurer reconcile his use of the word 'restraint' with the cold hard fact of $185 billion of increased spending? Is this not just a typical big-spending, big-taxing Labor budget?

Prior to the election, the Treasurer said:

There's lots that we can do to ease the cost of living pressures on families to make it easier to afford grocery prices …

Can the Treasurer detail how many grocery items on Australian shelves have experienced a reduction in price? What measures in this budget were directly targeted at reducing grocery prices? And why have these measures failed?

This budget confirms that around 175,000 Australians are projected to lose their jobs over the course of the next four years. This stands in stark contrast to the performance of the last government, which oversaw the creation of almost two million jobs during its term of office. Is job creation important to the Treasurer? What immediate steps is he taking to rectify the failings in his budget? Can the Treasurer confirm that the unionised workforce can expect more job certainty under this government than the non-unionised workforce?

Australia has experienced the steepest 12-month fall in productivity on record. The government has acknowledged this as a key area of concern.

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