Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with great pleasure to speak on the MPI as proposed by Senator Smith, because this budget is truly a fabrication—a papier-mache collection of lies and mistruths. The Labor Party, the now government, went to the last election with a whole series of commitments and promises which they have, one by one, broken, whether it be the Rockhampton ring road funding, the capital of Israel or the funding for various projects where they led Australians on and made the commitment that they would particularly support regional Australia.

This budget actually has more income than the last budget. It's up by $50 billion, thanks to commodity prices. But what has the government done with that increased income? Well, they've spent it. They've spent it. So spending is up from $628 billion to $651 billion. And that's not talking about the balance sheet items: the $20 billion for the power grid expenditure, $15 billion for reconstruction funding and another $10 billion. This budget is based on inflation increasing, effectively, to 7.75 per cent by the end of this year, but the government projects that by next year it will have fallen to 3.5 per cent. This seems to be a very bold statement to make. Real wages will continue going backwards. Wages will increase by 3.75 per cent, but that is not going to meet the inflation figures. People will lose jobs in 2023 according to Labor, based on the predicted unemployment rate of 4.5 per cent. That's 140,000 people out of work.

I think this is a budget that is misleading in the extreme. What has happened is that money has been ripped out of productive projects—projects that you would invest in if you were building a nation and if you were looking to the future. What this is is a Robin Hood budget that steals jobs from the future, but I just don't know who they're giving them to. Families will be $2,000 worse off under Labor by Christmas. We already pay more in the regions, but this is going to increase. We pay more for fuel, for groceries, for insurance, for electricity and for airfares. To Labor's eternal shame, they looked Australians in the eye, they begged for their votes and promised, in exchange for them, a reduction of electricity prices by $275 per year.

Now, Minister Gallagher has told us that that $275 reduction is in the budget. She said that today in question time, that it's in the budget.