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

My question is to the Treasurer. Labor has badly damaged the Queensland and Victorian economies. Now the Albanese Labor government is rating Australia sovereign wealth fund. Will the government guarantee that Future Fund investments will not assume spending commitments currently on the federal budget?

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've already answered that question, but I'll answer it again, and I'll answer it in a different way, given the shadow Treasurer was unable to understand the first way I explained it to him. What we are proposing with the Future Fund is not to replace, and is not instead of, government investment. The government is budgeting for, and is rolling out, substantial investments in housing and energy and infrastructure, and we are not proposing to change the carve-up between what the government does in our budgets and what the Future Fund do in their decisions.

I'll explain once again to the shadow Treasurer—I think everybody else understands this by now, but the shadow Treasurer strangely does not—that what is being proposed today does not change the fact that the Future Fund takes its investment decisions independently. We're not changing the expectations about the benchmark rate of return. We're not changing the Future Fund's appetite for risk. We're leaving the independence, the benchmark rate of return and the risk as they were.

What we're saying to the Future Fund is, 'As you make these investments, as you focus primarily on returns for the Australian taxpayer, we need you to make sure that you are focused as well on the major economic challenges that we confront as a country.' If those opposite don't think we've got a challenge with housing, they should say so. If they want there to be less investment in housing, just fess up—and same for clean energy and infrastructure and economic resilience.

There is no shortage of economic challenges and pressures coming at us from around the world and from around our country. Our job is to modernise our economy, to manage those pressures and to maximise the economic opportunities of a defining decade and to do that in the interests of our workers and our businesses, our communities and our investors. That's what these changes are all about.

I've got to say I expected the usual, predictable and partisan hyperventilating from the usual, predictable and partisan places, and that's what we've seen today. This is the first time the shadow Treasurer has got more than a question at three o'clock in a long time, but it's all designed to obscure that they don't want to see investment in housing and energy.

We want to see investment in housing and energy. The Future Fund will play its role independently. We'll continue to invest proudly. We've got a lot of ground to make up because when those opposite were in office we had a wasted decade of missed opportunities and warped priorities and a budget full of waste and rorts. We've been cleaning up the mess because we don't want to see Australia go backwards. We don't want to see all of this put at risk because of the record of those opposite.