Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This budget provides responsible cost-of-living relief for working families in my community, while building a strong economy for everyone in Blair. The budget delivers new help with cost-of-living relief, including more tax cuts for every taxpayer, more energy bill relief for every household and small business, more bulk-billing to help Australians to see a GP for free, even cheaper medicines, more cuts to HECS debts, historic funding for schools and more help to get Australians into a home of their own. As part of this budget, all 80,000 taxpayers in Blair will receive a new tax cut of up to $268 in 2026-27 and up to $536 in 2027-28. Combined with Labor's first run of tax cuts, the average benefit for taxpayers in my electorate will be almost $2,500 by 2027-28. In great news, every household in Blair will receive an extra $150 in help for their power bills, along with eligible small businesses, building on previous rounds of energy bill relief. Locals will save, from the government's reduction of the maximum general copayment for medicines, $25 per prescription under the Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme from 1 January 2026. This means that more than 42,000 cheaper scripts are expected to be dispensed on average each year in Blair, saving residents more than $1.5 million.

Further to this, our record $8.5 billion investment in Medicare is expected to see an additional 117,700 bulk-billed visits and a boost to fully bulk-billing GP practices in Blair to around 35, around four times the current nine practices. This will save locals hundreds of dollars a year, depending on how often they visit their GP. For example, a young family with two parents in their 30s and two children under five years old could save from $236 to $296 a year. On top of this, our Ipswich Medicare urgent care clinic is providing bulk-billed care for Blair constituents closer to home when they need it. I'm proud to have opened this clinic in 2023, which has been a huge success, with more than 12,500 visits in the first year alone. It is helping to take the pressure of the Ipswich general hospital emergency department.

When it comes to student debt, 23,000 people in Blair with an outstanding HECS debt will receive an average reduction of $5,357 on their loans. I'm pleased to say this budget is providing vital support to housing affordability. The government's expanded Help to Buy program will help allocate money to the states on a per capita basis with a minimum of 8,200 places estimated to be available to Queensland over the life of the scheme, and I would expect a number of these places will be allocated to my electorate. The government has already helped locals buy their own homes with more than 4,200 guarantees issued to Ipswich homebuyers under the government's expanded Home Guarantee Scheme between May 2022 and March 2025, one of the highest take-ups across the country.

In more good news this week, the Albanese government signed a $2.8 billion school funding agreement with the Queensland government. The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement will lift the federal government's contribution from 20 per cent up to 25 per cent of the school resource standards by 2034 for public schools in Queensland, including in Blair, which is a fantastic outcome for local schoolkids. Critically, as part of the fastest-growing region in the country, this budget will deliver vital transport and community infrastructure. To that end, the government has locked in $20 million in funding for the Brisbane Valley Highway upgrades in the Sommerset, bringing the Australian government's total commitment to $40 million.

Also, we are supporting local multicultural communities with a $20 million investment in African-Australian communities. With the member for Oxley, I was there when that funding was announced, which includes $4 million for the Queensland African Communities Council's very successful African village project, which includes the African youth centre in Redbank Plains in Ipswich in the electorate of Oxley, very close to the electorate of Blair.

This year people in my electorate of Blair will face a clear choice: a choice between Labor's plan to build Australia's future or the opposition leader's promised cut to the things that Australians rely upon. That is the choice for my constituents: build with Labor or cut with the LNP.

Cameron Caldwell (Fadden, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's wonderful to have the opportunity to rise to speak on this adjournment on the day after the budget was handed down by Treasurer Jim Chalmers. How do Australians feel today—the day after this wonderful Jim Chalmers budget? Well, I can tell you how they feel. They feel just as broke as they felt yesterday. That is the truth of it, because Treasurer Jim Chalmers did not charm us. He's a doctor, but he's not a doctor of economics; he is a doctor of spin. So what we saw was lots of slick lines. There was a sprinkling of cash. But, honest to goodness, this was not what Australians were looking for. The Treasurer aspires to greatness. We know that he's studied Paul Keating, one of the greatest Labor figures of our time. But this Treasurer is Keating-lite. There is nothing of substance to offer the Australian people beyond a sprinkling of cash—70c a day in 12 months time.

We were so shocked by this pathetic attempt to try to buy votes that we almost lost sight of the fact that we have now nudged $1 trillion of national debt. This Treasurer and this Albanese Labor government have completely lost control of the finances of the nation. That means that the household budget now hurts even more. These tax cuts, as they have been described, are nothing more than a cruel hoax. I stand outside shopping centres in my electorate in places like Labrador, Pacific Pines and Coomera. At each of these locations in recent weeks, people were gravely concerned about the cost of groceries. Food has gone up by 13 per cent, insurance is up by 19 per cent and electricity is up by 32 per cent, and yet what did we see last night from this amazing Treasurer? We saw $150 off your electricity bill. That's not touching the sides because the reality of this cost-of-living crisis that every Australian family is facing is that, if you are a mortgage holder, you are $50,000 worth off than when Labor came to office.

And so, tomorrow night, the Leader of the Opposition will speak from the dispatch box. He will give his budget reply speech, and I think it's something that Australians should tune in to. He will outline a pathway to prosperity and a pathway to a secure nation, economically and in terms of our national security credentials. It doesn't have to be like this, under this terrible Albanese Labor government. We know that we can't afford another three years of Labor. We simply must get Australia back on track.

We know that there are so many sectors that are under attack by this Labor government. What was exposed today and laid bear in question time was that small businesses under this government are going to continue to suffer. If it weren't enough to put up their power prices and to destroy their businesses with industrial relations frameworks that are completely unworkable, what we have now seen is that an instant asset write-off that they quite simply could have claimed in a very simple ATO transaction has now been reduced to $1,000. What the coalition will do is support small and family businesses by providing a $30,000 instant asset write-off, and we will make that permanent. That is just one of the things that we will do to help restore prosperity in our economy. We must get Australia back on track with a coalition government.