Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to start by acknowledging that the budget made some important commitments, which I welcome and they have been welcomed by the Wentworth community. These include more support for Australia's health system, more support for our aged-care system and the foundation investment in household electrification. In those respects and in others the budget was one that listened and responded to concerns of my community. But in other respects, and very important respects, it was not. The missing piece in this year's budget was a reform agenda focussed on dealing with some of the highest-priority long-term issues facing our economy, which will have a particularly detrimental effect on younger and future generations. I believe the Treasurer cares about the future, and I believe that he cares about intergenerational issues. But I think it is pretty clear that the budget failed to give appropriate weight to three of the most important concerns: the affordability of housing, the sustainability of our tax system and the rate of productivity growth in our economy. Each of these has real and negative impacts on Australians today but also much deeper consequences for our youth and future generations.

Three statistics outline the challenge. On housing: Australia's housing is some of the most unaffordable on earth. Sydney, where my electorate is, is the second most unaffordable place in world to live from a housing point of view, second only to Hong Kong. On tax: Australia is highly reliant on personal income taxes, but, as our population ages, we will either have to rely more and more on fewer workers to support the population or engage in meaningful tax reform. On productivity: productivity growth is now the slowest it has been for six decades. In fact, last year it went backwards by over four per cent. Low productivity growth is the most important factor in long-term improvements to standards of living. In each area of the budget, there were efforts to address these issues, but they were without the scale of ambition required for these problems. Really addressing these issues—real ambition—is what my community is asking for.

While there were welcome pieces in the budget on housing, such as changing the tax treatment of international build-to-rent properties, there was not a significant commitment to driving housing reform at the scale that is needed to rebalance income and housing costs, such as through hard incentives for states and local governments to rezone land. Scale of action is what we need. The government has said they're interested in building one million new homes in the five years up to 2030. If you look at the OECD figures, Australia's need for housing is possibly closer to two million homes, if you're going to truly address housing affordability. So the question to the Treasurer is: why not go further, and why not show further ambition?

The second missed opportunity was tax reform. Given the Prime Minister's commitment to not do anything on tax, I wasn't that surprised, but true tax reform only becomes more urgent and more important the longer we leave it. There were small changes in taxes such as PRRT, but the truth is that small fiddles such as those to the PRRT just make it harder to do truly transformational longer term reform, including on resource taxes. The question to the Treasurer is: why not at least kick off a consultation on tax so that you have something substantial to take to the future?

A final missed opportunity was productivity reform. I support the government's efforts in productivity reform, such as investment in reforming the migration system and in TAFE. These are critical. But there is no agenda from the government about how to make it easier for businesses to thrive and scale in this economy, nor how to drive productivity in the government sectors.

We had three things they could have done. We could have had a comprehensive response to the Productivity Commission's recent report. We pay these people to come up with reports on productivity. Surely, given the productivity crisis we're facing, we could get a government response as to which methods they're taking forward and which ones they're not taking forward and why.

Secondly, we need to adopt a cultural shift, as embodied, I think, in Service NSW, and apply that to federal government. Our systems are set up to suit the government rather than the people. This is true of the medical researcher who spends a quarter of their time on government grant writing instead of researching and of the not-for-profit that loses experienced staff because they don't know whether their contracts are ongoing or not in the next few months.

Finally, we need to listen to business about what they think is most important to driving productivity. The two biggest issues raised by business with me are around reforming industrial relations awards so they're simpler and right-sizing regulation so that regulations aren't put on top of each other and mixed in with state regulation. The budget ignored both of these pleas from business. Housing, tax and productivity—they are issues today; they're only going to be more important in the future. These were missed opportunities in the budget.

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