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

It is absolutely clear that what we have just seen handed down in this place is a budget for the next five weeks, not the next five years. It is a budget for the prosperity of the Treasurer and the Prime Minister, not the prosperity of hardworking Australians. What Labor is offering in this budget is a cruel hoax, and this Treasurer is a cruel hoax and this Prime Minister is a cruel hoax because what they have said to the Australian people, as their standard of living has absolutely collapsed, is that all they need to make up for that is 70c a day, starting over a year from now. This is truly offensive to the Australian people.

I laid out before this budget flop, as I did before the other three budget flops, a very clear test for what the Australian people could reasonably expect of a good budget. At the top of that list was the restoration of their standard of living that has collapsed under Labor. The facts on this are important, because we have never seen a collapse like we've seen in the last 2½ years in Australia's standard of living. That is the goods and services that their incomes can buy. We've never seen it before.

Many of us remember the early seventies under that great government, the Whitlam government, from 1972 to 1975—they were an absolute shocker. It was so bad that by 1975, at the ripe old age of nine, I was out campaigning for the Country Party. That's how bad it got. But it wasn't as bad as this. Many of us will remember the 'recession we had to have' from the hero of the Treasurer, Paul Keating, who now hates the Treasurer because the Treasurer wants to go after unrealised capital gains. It's worse now than it was back then. We have never seen that eight per cent drop. The hard reality for an Australian family with a mortgage in Western Sydney and much of Australia right now is that they have had to find in the last three years $40,000 in after-tax income that they did not expect to have to find—$40,00—and this lot think that 70 cents a day, in over a year from now, will make up for that. Now, that's a cruel hoax.

The second thing we said was that we need to restore hope for the Australian people. We need to see a light at the end of the tunnel, a genuine light at the end of the tunnel, and we did not see that in this budget. When we get around Australia and talk to small-business people and hardworking Australians, which is what my colleagues here today do every single day when they are outside of this place, we hear time and time again that Australians are losing hope. Young Australians who are wanting to buy a house are losing hope. Slightly older Australians with a family who have bought a house, who have a mortgage and who want to be able to pay it out, are losing hope. Those 2.5 million Australians who have a small business, I tell you what, they are losing hope. Some 29,000 small businesses have gone under, a record number, under this government. We have seen incomes of small-business people absolutely smashed. When I get around my electorate, what I see time and time again is people who run cafes and pubs having to work weekends because they can't afford to pay the overtime if they are going to be able to pay themselves. This is a disastrous situation for small businesses, and it's no wonder we are seeing them go under. With an 18 per cent drop in their incomes, they are losing hope.

The third test for this budget was that they restore some integrity to the budget. Now, we have already seen three budget flops. The hope was they would re-establish those disciplines, those rules, that were put in place all those years ago by the Liberal government to make sure that there was a budget that wasn't going to leave billions and billions of dollars on the credit card for the Australian people. When we look at those three tests, Labor has absolutely failed. Our standard of living, according to the Reserve Bank now, won't get back to where it was when Labor came to power until 2031. If there was ever a lost decade, this is it. We are not getting back to where we were when we were in government until 2031. These are dark times but there is nothing in this budget that has any hope of getting us back to where we were any faster.

In terms of hope, there is nothing here. All any Australian can hope for is 70c a day. Is that it? Is that the full extent of it? In terms of budget integrity, well, this was truly a shameful budget. It was a big spending, big taxing, big Australia, big deficit budget. I will go through each of those pieces because each of them is worth expanding on. On big spending, there has been over $400 billion of additional spending since Labor has come to power. The Treasurer likes to say that he hasn't spent all the windfalls he got. Well, you know what? He is also a big taxing Treasurer because that's gone up by $400 billion as well. He has spent the lot of it and more, and that is why we see red ink as far as the eye can see, with $170 billion of deficits over the forwards. That is 6,000 bucks on the credit card of each Australian—$6,000! For an Australian family, it's more like $15,000 put on the credit card. I tell you what, Australians are indeed paying for that 70c a day they will be getting in 15 months time, which is not going to touch the sides.

What we also saw in this budget is a big Australia plan—1.8 million new Australians over the course of five years. We are a great immigrant nation. As the member for Banks said just before question time, we are a great immigrant nation. We have managed to be a great immigrant nation by getting the balance right between the number of new people coming into the country and our capacity to cope with that—the new houses, the infrastructure and the services that we need. The trouble is, when you bring in over one million people in just two years, the balance is never going to be right.

As it turns out, it's worse than that, because the housing supply under this Labor government has absolutely collapsed. The ambassador for excuses over there—the Treasurer—will blame anyone. President Xi gets a blame. Donald Trump gets a blame. Putin has had a blame. He'll blame the lot.

The dog has always eaten this bloke's homework! He was struggling today because of the $1 trillion of debt. We heard a lot about that. It turns out it's his. He'll be looking for excuses for that, but the truth of the matter is that their housing supply has absolutely collapsed. They promised 1.2 million houses, just like they promised a $275 reduction in electricity bills and just like they promised a lower cost of living. Their housing programs haven't delivered a single house—zippo. They haven't delivered a single house; meanwhile, the records keep getting broken for the number of people coming to Australia. What we saw in the forecast for this year is another increase as they get the forecast wrong yet again.

There is a better way—beating inflation; boosting growth; cutting waste; getting rid of red tape; knocking down the barriers to growth like the CFMEU, which has made the construction industry a nigh-on-impossible place to get things done; fixing the housing supply by breaking infrastructure bottlenecks; delivering that affordable, reliable energy that every Australian wants to see; and balancing housing supply with immigration. We cannot afford another three years of Labor; there is a better way.

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