Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Like the minister, I seek leave to make a short statement on the ministerial statement.

Leave granted.

I thank the Senate. This economic statement, or so-called economic statement, tabled and delivered by the Treasurer in the other place, is a demonstration that this is a government that has no plan. It's a government big on promises and big on platitudes, that, as the Treasurer himself acknowledged, sought to 'paint a picture' today of those promises and platitudes. But it has no plan. It's a government that, through the election campaign, talked a big game. Through the election campaign, it promised that wages would be higher, growth would be higher and interest rates would be lower—that all of these things would magically materialise if we just had a Labor government. Nine weeks ago they were promising that they had all of the answers and all of the solutions.

But what's been delivered in today's statement? It's an economic statement that lays the foundation for the government to break all of those promises—to not deliver upon the commitments and the promises that they made. Throughout the statement, the Treasurer says that it's 'complex'; it's 'difficult'; there are 'pressures' and 'problems'; 'it will take time' and there are 'challenges'; they're all the Treasurer's words. He offers no solutions in the statement, no plan and no announcements—just a series of complaints that it's tough.

Well, yes. Government is tough. We were upfront, through the election campaign, that there were real challenges for Australia that were faced as a result of a range of different global circumstances.

But Mr Chalmers, Mr Albanese and those on the other side endlessly stated that they had, apparently, the answers to the challenges. Well, where are they? Where are those answers when you look at today's statement? It offers nothing other than a downgrading of those promises. Instead of wages being higher, as the Labor Party promised going into the election, Mr Chalmers delivered a statement today showing real wages would be lower. Instead of growth being higher—as Labor endlessly said and as Mr Chalmers went into the election indicating—now there's a statement showing that growth will be lower. And, of course, instead of interest rates being lower, as Labor emphasised throughout the election, they now acknowledge that interest rates will be higher.

Labor said during the election that the cost of living was the biggest issue. One of the areas where they promised a solution was an explicit promise by the Prime Minister to take $275 off household electricity bills. And now? There's no commitment to that promise anymore. When asked directly, the government fudges its way around the $275 commitment. They fudge; they dodge; they refuse to repeat that. Clearly they don't expect there will be any relief from electricity prices. The $275 promise was designed to go on election material, not to be delivered in government.

On wages, the government now says they have to wait some years. It's not what they were saying during the election campaign when they were promising real wages growth all the time under a Labor government. Now they say it will take years.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Labor Party, in opposition, said that unemployment would be the key measure of the coalition government's success in managing the economic impacts of that global health crisis. And we delivered on that unemployment benchmark—something foreign, it seems, to this government. Under our government, unemployment hit a near-50-year low: 3.9 per cent when we left office. The Labor Party had set a benchmark, and we well and truly met and exceeded that benchmark in terms of creating jobs and driving down unemployment, laying the foundation for the most recent 3½ per cent unemployment rate recorded.

But what's the commitment from the government now? Well, today's statement shows they expect unemployment to deteriorate: they expect unemployment to go back up—just as they seem to expect that power prices will be higher, not lower; growth will be lower, not higher; and interest rates will be higher, not lower. This is a government that clearly has come to office on a litany of vague promises and aspirations. But now the Treasurer is starting to try to lay the foundation for a budget that he will hand down in a couple of months time, where he's indicating that he expects things to be difficult. And governing is difficult, as we have always acknowledged, but this government needs to try to live up to the rhetoric that it laid out in the election campaign.

This government will be held to account for what they've said about wages, what they've said about interest rates, what they've said about questions like spending, because only one party went to the election campaign with savings that exceeded their spending promises—the Liberal and National parties. The Labor Party went into the election campaign promising more spending and much more that they didn't account for. Let's see, in future budgets, when the Labor Party says that they want to tackle debt and deficit, whether that spending comes down or goes up, because if they are to deliver on their promises then it's only going one way, and that's going to be up, and that's going to mean a higher deficit and higher debts in the future.

There was, of course, one acknowledgement through the Treasurer's comments today of the previous government's work—that is, that the final budget outcome for 2021-22 will be dramatically better than expected. That's an admission of the coalition's budget management, an admission that our conservative economic forecasts in our budgets and our strong plans for growth have delivered outcomes exceeding expectations: unemployment lower than we had forecast; growth delivered through our term in government exceeding, usually, the budget forecasts in recent years; and a budget outcome much stronger than had been forecast. That's what a good government does. This government, based on today's statement, leaves little hope of it emulating such outcomes.