Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is nothing more disingenuous than the Liberal Party, after a decade of government—of poor, wasted, pathetic, profligate Liberal government—coming into this place and pretending that they are on the side of working people, that they care about cost-of-living pressures. There is a reality here that, as frustrated as working people might be with their economic circumstances on any given day—and they can be very difficult, and they have been for a period of time—there is not one working Australian who believes that the answer is the Liberal Party. There's a temptation during these debates, when people roll in after a big night and beak off at the dispatch box with their misguided views about this and that, to engage directly with the matters they put on the table—the dead pig, so to speak. But there is a saying—and I'm not going to address it directly to any individual—that you don't wrestle with a pig, because you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

I think when it comes to this particular debate, we need to focus on those very significant policy interventions that the Albanese Labor government have pursued in regard to easing the cost-of-living pressures on working people here in Australia. Obviously the budget came down last night, but we've actually been aware for a number of weeks now of the most important policy measure that our government are going to implement for working people to ease their cost-of-living burden, and that is Labor's tax cut plan: a tax cut for every taxpaying Australian. That's 13.6 million Australians who are going to receive a tax cut on 1 July. They won't have to fill out any paperwork. They won't have to go through a tedious process and wait for their tax return to come in—whatever the obstructive procedure that might have been put in place by the Liberals to prevent working people from accessing things they're entitled to. Every single Australian is going to receive a tax cut from 1 July. In my electorate, that's 73,000 taxpayers. The average household in my electorate, with two workers—a mum and a dad or whatever the combination of workers—will receive $2,856 a year. There is no more direct way to relieve cost-of-living pressure without adding to inflation than delivering the biggest tax cuts for Australians that have ever been delivered, and that is the centrepiece of the budget that Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down last night.

There is a fundamental principle behind this. Our government want Australians to earn more. It's why we've worked so hard to get wages moving again. Remember, Madam Deputy Speaker, that we had a decade of wage stagnation—indeed, real wage decline—under the former government. It wasn't by accident. To be fair to them, it wasn't a stuff-up. They had plenty of those, but this wasn't. They made very clear that it was a deliberate design feature of the economy they sought to build for the Australian people. We have wages moving in Australia once again, because we want people to earn more. The other part of that is that we want them to keep more of what they earn. We want Australians to have lower costs, and part of that lower cost base is dealing with rising taxes. That is why we have adjusted the stage 3 tax cut arrangements—why we have implemented a new plan that ensures every single working Australian taxpayer will get a tax cut on 1 July.

There are challenges. There are fiscal challenges in our economy. We inherited a trillion dollars of Liberal debt. There was a decade of stagnant productivity and the worst period of real wage decline in Australia's history, so there has been a lot of work to do, and in two short years we've halved the inflation problem. It should fairly be addressed that the cost of mortgages is related to the inflation problem. The inflation problem began under the former Liberal government. We are getting on with the tax cuts and the power bill incentives that will ease the cost of living. All those opposite can do is carp from the sidelines and crow about nothing.

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