Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask the Treasurer: would he remind the House how the Morrison government's budget tax cuts and incentives are providing relief for Australian households, assisting businesses to generate more jobs and driving our comeback from the COVID-19 recession?

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Menzies, the Father of the House, for that question. I acknowledge that in his electorate around 70,000 taxpayers are benefiting from the tax cuts that we announced in this year's budget and subsequently legislated. In the honourable member's electorate of Menzies, some 7,000 businesses have been benefiting from JobKeeper, and that JobKeeper program and those JobKeeper payments have been an economic lifeline to millions of Australians.

The honourable member refers to the various incentives that the government has been providing both to households and to businesses to support them through this once-in-a-century economic shock. That has included tax cuts—bringing forward by two years our legislated tax cuts and adding an additional year of the LMITO, the low- and middle-income tax offset. Those tax cuts are already starting to flow through to the bank balances of Australians right across the country. According to Treasury, those tax cuts will help create around 50,000 jobs. A key characteristic of this year's budget, on 6 October, was that the government doesn't see itself as the solution. The government sees itself as a catalyst for a private-sector-led recovery to this economic shock.

With nearly nine out of every ten Australian jobs in the private sector, what we did in this budget was put in place incentives to encourage more investment—for example, the loss carry-back measure, as well as the immediate expensing incentive that applies to businesses with a turnover of up to $5 billion. This will cover around $200 billion of investment, and it will strongly support small businesses, because small businesses will be selling that new machinery or equipment. They'll be installing it. They'll be servicing it. They'll be buying it themselves, for their own businesses. We've met many businesses across the country that are taking advantage of not just the loss carry-back but also the instant asset write-off and the immediate expensing. In this budget, there was also the JobMaker hiring credit, which will help support up to around 450,000 jobs across the economy and which was legislated through the parliament.

All these measures are helping to drive more people into work. Just last night we saw the OECD upgrade its economic forecast for Australia, and just today we have seen the largest increase in quarterly GDP, of 3.3 per cent, since 1976. So the Morrison government is getting on with the job it was elected by the Australian people to do, which was to help create jobs right across the country and help keep people in secure work. (Time expired)