Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the additional appropriation bills of 2022-23. These bills, Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2022-2023, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2022-2023 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2022-2023, provide for additional funds from consolidated revenue for the remainder of the 2022-23 year. Collectively, the additional appropriation bills of 2022-23 appropriate approximately $6.2 billion from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. The majority, approximately $5.5 billion of this, is to ensure that there is funding to cover upward revisions in demand driven programs or other departmental funding.

The opposition will be supporting the additional appropriation bills. However, this support should not be misconstrued as support for many of the ineffectual or misguided policies of Labor's 2022-23 October budget. In all the recent media about Labor's train wreck 2023-24 budget we may forget the failures of the October budget.

Labor's October budget was indeed a failure. There was no sustainable cost-of-living relief. There was no handbrake on the taxes imposed on Australians. They have entirely abandoned the 23.9 per cent tax to GDP cap, and indeed the only new change to the tax system that was announced in this budget was a new tax on investments, the retiree tax 2.0.

Labor's sneaky new tax will slug people that invest their own savings and superannuation. Despite ruling out these changes amongst many others before the election, Labor will in fact hit retirees and investors with a new $555 million tax, depriving investors of franking credits which they have previously relied upon. They have no plan at all to reduce spending, and we know now that they spent even more in the 2023-24 budget. There is no certainty for the 10 million Australians on their legislated tax relief that's due in 2024. We still don't have an unequivocal statement from the Treasurer that Australians will receive the stage 3 tax cuts—just weasel words—the stage 3 tax cuts that so many Australians are relying on.

Since the October budget, the RBA has increased the cash rate six times just between budgets, pausing only to see if the government's 2023-24 budget would deliver any assistance at all. As we know, none came.

Senator McGrath presently noted in his response to the October budget in this chamber:

This government's reckless spending is forcing the RBA to ratchet up interest rates, and mortgagees are feeling it. Rate rises every month since this government has come to power, with each one making it harder for Australians to pay their mortgage, buy groceries, pay their bills, all thanks to this Labor government.

He went on to say, in his typically eloquent Senator McGrath manner, when taken as a whole, this budget fails a test:

… indeed, it even fails Labor's own test set by them. This budget breaks many of the promises the government made before the election. It lets Australia down. Australians were promised cost-of-living relief but, just in time for Christmas, they see this government has no plan to help them.

If only the government had listened to the wise words of Senator McGrath. Instead, we saw the same old approach in May and, predictably, the same result. Australians didn't get cost relief for Christmas. They got more rate rises, they got higher grocery prices and they got higher energy bills.

We know that Australians got no cost-of-living relief in the October budget simply by looking at the government's own actions. Cost-of-living pressures reached crisis levels by the time of the October budget, but the government failed to deliver any cost-of-living relief or policy to combat inflation. This is Labor's cost-of-living crisis, and it is doing nothing to help ordinary Australians. This was so obviously a failure of government that the government recalled parliament in December to ram through a ham-fisted intervention in the energy market. It did so because there was an urgency to cost-of-living relief. There was an urgency to high energy bills.

Perhaps the only thing in the October budget that we can trust is that prediction, that forecast, that energy prices will continue to skyrocket. We can trust that there will certainly be no reduction in energy bills by $275, despite the comments from the Prime Minister prior to the election. More than 90 times he promised to $275 reduction in energy bills because of the policies of this government. Well, by October they had failed. By may they had failed again. One year on and the government has broken this among many promises.

We found so soon after the October budget was delivered that it was, in fact, full of holes and fake savings—like their saving on consultants, on travel, on legal expenses and on advertising. In the most recent budget we saw that Labor gave themselves an extra year to achieve that saving that they banked back in October, and then we found out that the savings didn't even really need to be spent on consultants or travel or legal expenses or advertising. They were just suggestions: 'You can find those savings anywhere you like, but this is where we'd like you to find the savings. We've banked them, certainly, but just find them where you can.' This was simply an efficiency dividend by stealth.

Labor's biggest spend in the October budget was, in fact, the canary in the coalmine for the big spending that would come in Labor's May budget. Back in the October budget the government announced $115 billion of new spending—new spending, not belt-tightening. Not to be outdone by past efforts, the Treasurer and the finance minister managed to deliver a budget last month that included $185 billion of extra spending while, at the same time, managing to cut productivity enhancing infrastructure—new spending and productivity enhancing infrastructure cut. This new spending has unquestionably added to inflationary pressures in an already high inflationary environment, making the cost-of-living crisis that Australians are experiencing under Labor even worse. It means that inflation stays higher for longer. It means that interest rates will therefore have to stay higher for longer. This is a cost-of-living crisis of Labor's making.

This isn't simply the view of the opposition. It's the view of independent economists. Chris Richardson, for instance, said it very clearly. He said:

I had thought that the Reserve Bank was done and dusted but this—

the budget—

has notably raised the chance that they will do another swing of the baseball bat …

I'm sure Australians are thrilled to hear that the baseball bat is being taken out for them. BetaShares economist David Bassanese said that Labor's budget was 'unambiguously expansionary'. And all this is at a time when the Reserve Bank is trying to contract the economy. It has a contractionary monetary policy. The fiscal policy of this government is unambiguously expansionary. Experts from EY, from PinPoint Macro Analytics, from UBS and from HSBC have all lined up to call out this government's budget, which will do nothing to address inflation, meaning that inflation will be higher for longer, thanks to the decisions that have been taken—actively taken—by this government.

So how are they trying to pay for all this new spending? Two new taxes on regional Australia will add to those inflationary pressures and increase the price of groceries. There's a new food and fibre tax on farmers, in the form of a 10 per cent increase on agricultural levies. How can this possibly be fair? There's a biosecurity levy on those that are paying the price of biosecurity threats, rather than on those that are importing the biosecurity threats. How can this possibly be fair? It's known that this government, by imposing this levy on farmers, is simply going to see the cost directly passed on to consumers at the grocery check-out. Everything you buy that comes from a farm will be more expensive because of decisions the Labor government has made. But wait, there's more—because there's also a tax on truckies, with a 5.2c per litre increase in the heavy-vehicle road user charge. So, while your more expensive lettuces are on the way to the grocery store, they're going to be taxed again—twice—and you will end up paying for that.

Average, ordinary Australians will end up paying the price for the decisions that this government has made—decisions to spend more and tax more. And why are they doing that? Because it's in Labor's DNA. This is who they are. They spend more; they tax more. They talk about fiscal responsibility, they talk about good economic management, but that's prior to an election. Once they get into government, history repeats itself. All of a sudden, it's deja vu all over again: high tax, high spend and Australians pay the price.

This is just a snapshot of the failures of this Labor government on managing the economy and managing the budget. Philip Lowe has called them out. He has said that there are risks to the economy and that it is a 'narrow path' that he is treading. The reason why he's treading that narrow path is that he is doing all the heavy lifting to manage the economy, because Labor has essentially raised the white flag. Even though, back in the October budget, Jim Chalmers looked Australians in the eye and said that inflation was public enemy No. 1 and that inflation was the dragon that we needed to slay, everything he has done has been entirely different to everything he has said. Because he's waved the white flag on inflation, the RBA has been left to do all the heavy lifting. That is their job; their job is to manage inflation. They've been given no help from the government, so of course they're forced to lift interest rates, the one and only tool that they have in the shed. Of course they're forced to continue to impose interest rate rises on mortgage holders in Australia.

At the same time, Jim Chalmers has the audacious hypocrisy to then turn to Philip Lowe, the RBA Governor, and say he needs to explain his actions. I don't think so. Indeed, it's Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese that need to explain their actions and to explain to the Australian people why they promised cost-of-living relief and yet delivered so little; why they promised that it would be cheaper to pay their mortgages, and yet their mortgages have done nothing but go up. In fact, for a family that has a $750,000 mortgage, mortgage repayments have gone up to $22,000 a year. That's not the sort of money you find down the back of the couch. Where's the average family supposed to find that sort of money?

This is what the decisions of this government have made. These are the implications for ordinary Australians. Prior to the election, the government said they were going to reduce your energy bills. They have failed. They have failed to reduce energy bills because they have put ideology over the cost-of-living crisis that is facing ordinary Australians and ahead of the essential services they need. That's why you are paying higher electricity prices. You are paying higher grocery prices because of the taxes the government are imposing on farmers and truckies.

The opposition will support these additional appropriation bills, but understand that this government is making your life harder. The decisions that it's taking are making your life more difficult. Is there an Australian out there today that says they are feeling better off than they were just 12 months ago? If you can find me that Australian, that would be fantastic. Perhaps they could submit to the cost-of-living committee, because all the evidence that we hear as we travel around Australia is that Australians are doing it tough and that this government is not stepping up to help them. Indeed, it is potentially making a bad situation worse. We will support these additional appropriation bills, but we will also continue to hold the government to account over the budget decisions that it has made, the reckless spending that it continues to make and the increased taxes that it continues to impose on unsuspecting Australians who didn't vote for this. They didn't vote for this. They voted for one thing and got another. But, then again, that's Labor. That's in Labor's DNA—high taxes, high spending and broken promises.