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

I rise to speak on the government's Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024 and Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living—Medicare Levy) Bill 2024. At the outset let me say that the Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024 is perhaps the high-water mark of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's breach of trust of the Australian people. It represents the culmination of a long, methodical and intentional mistruth told to the Australian people hundreds of times since before the 2022 election. It was finally brought out into the open on 25 January, when the Prime Minister and the Treasurer stepped into the Prime Minister's courtyard and announced that, despite everything that they had said over the last two years, they would be amending the third stage of the tax cuts delivered by the coalition in a previous parliament. This is the bill that finally and completely smashes any semblance of credibility that this Prime Minister had. Who will ever believe this Prime Minister when he makes them a promise again? After telling Australians, 'My word is my bond,' and insisting more than a hundred times, with his Treasurer, that there would be no more changes to the stage 3 tax cuts, the Prime Minister broke his word. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's word is clearly worthless.

Evidence that the cost-of-living committee has heard from the Treasury demonstrates that the Prime Minister's mistruths are even more egregious. While the Treasury confirmed that it had been tasked with actively examining ways to amend the stage 3 tax cuts on 11 December last year, dozens of times after that point the Prime Minister looked Australians in the eye and said, 'We are not reconsidering that position.' As far as shameless mistruths go, that one should shoot right to the top of the list, but there are plenty more to choose from. Don't forget, 'Energy bills will fall by $275,' and, 'Labor has real and lasting plans for cheaper electricity and cheaper mortgages.' But what about this one, Mr Deputy President: 'I'll say this very clearly. Australians will be better off under a Labor government'? That was Prime Minister Albanese back in April 2022 when he was opposition leader Anthony Albanese.

The fact is, despite the words of the Prime Minister, Australians are really doing it tough, and they have been for a long time; they have been for more than 18 months. Labor's cost-of-living crisis is crushing Australians. As Chair of the Select Committee on the Cost of Living, along with my deputy, who is now sitting in the chair, I have heard regularly from witnesses right across the country and right across the spectrum about just how tough it is out there for ordinary Australians paying their mortgages or rent, paying their gas and electricity bills and paying for groceries at the supermarket, because of Labor's inability to manage the economy. Just recently, in Gladstone, we heard from a local council that younger people were being forced to choose between paying their rent or seeing a GP, because there are no longer any GPs in Gladstone that allow for bulk-billing and those young people's budgets are simply at breaking point. Time and time again—from Port Augusta to Parramatta, from Box Hill to Launceston—we have heard from families with one income, or even two incomes, who are forced to seek charitable assistance because they can't pay their mortgage or put food on the table.

Poor economic conditions and a cost-of-living crisis are not, despite what Labor will tell you, acts of nature. When inflation stays higher for longer, when interest rates stay higher for longer, when your real disposable incomes go backwards at record rates, this is a failure to manage the economy. It's not bad luck; it's bad management.

With that, I move:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate notes that:

(a) this government has mismanaged the economy and made a deliberate decision to break promises and raise taxes;

(b) the Coalition is committed to lower, simpler and fairer taxes;

(c) because Australians are hurting from the Government's mismanagement of the economy, the Coalition will not oppose the reduction in the 19c tax rate to 16c;

(d) the Coalition is committed to going to the next election with a tax reform package that is in keeping with the stage 3 tax cuts; and

(e) the Coalition's package will:

(i) deliver lower, simpler, and fairer taxes,

(ii) fight bracket creep and enshrine aspiration in our tax system,

(iii) reward hard work and support a strong economy where every Australian can get ahead, and

(iv) unite, rather than pit Australians against each other".

I note that this government has mismanaged the economy and made a deliberate decision to break promises, to raise taxes and to abandon any genuine reform on personal income taxes. We have a government that is more interested in radical, productivity-sapping industrial relations than in getting productivity moving, and what is the result? Well, productivity is flat and economic growth is non-existent. Based on the most recent data, if it weren't for the massive immigration numbers, we would be in a recession. This per-capita recession that we are now in is what ordinary Australians are feeling every single day. Businesses are folding and it's becoming harder and harder to employ people. Things are not getting better under Labor; they are going backwards. At the same time, we note that the Prime Minister has hired more than 10,000 new public servants in Canberra. But Australians aren't feeling 10,000 people better served by this government. Instead, they're feeling the pinch of the cost-of-living crisis with no plan in sight and no response from this government—simply rhetoric.

The Prime Minister promised in January 2023 that his New Year's resolution was to address the cost of living. In January of this year, in a moment of out-of-character candour, he admitted that 'cost-of-living pressures had lasted much longer than people thought'. What a surprise! And, he said, 'the range of measures that we put in place had not been effective enough'. These are the Prime Minister's words: 'the range of measures that Labor put in place have not been effective'. Well, what on earth have they been doing for the last 18 months?

That brings us to the bills before us, the culmination of this deceit. The facts demonstrate that these bills are simply a political response, a PR response, a quick fix that has little relationship to the cost-of-living pressures that Australians face every day. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind the chamber of something that Minister Gallagher said about the original stage 3 tax cuts in February last year. When asked by Senator McKim which of those three points the stage 3 cuts fit under, Senator Gallagher promptly replied, 'the cost of living'. Go figure!

This was a deceit long in the making that found its moment under the guise of urgent cost-of-living relief. But how does that stack up? The Treasury confirmed that the changes to the Medicare levy were, in fact, provisioned in the 2023-24 MYEFO but they weren't announced. How urgent is this cost-of-living crisis if you provision for a policy, if you make a decision on a policy, but you don't announce it for a couple of months? How urgent can it be? The government was content to make a change and not announce it straightaway as Australians went through a very costly and very uncertain Christmas, because it wanted to bank that political credit.

We saw recently that the government were advertising for PR professionals for the Treasury to be paid around $150,000 to deal with 'suppliers, including creative research and public relations agencies'. When pressed about the timing of the decision and its significance, we heard the Treasurer say it was not taken in the usual course of the budget processes. What did the Treasurer say? He said, 'We had to do this before Dunkley.' Whoops! He said the quiet bit out loud. 'We had to do this before a by-election'. How shamelessly political! Then came the real shocker. The same day that Labor announced $14 million in additional spending for food-relief agencies like Foodbank, who are doing so much of the heavy lifting right now, it was uncovered that they were also going to spend $40 million—not $14 million but $40 million—of taxpayers' money to try to spin their broken promise. They are going to create a $40 million ad campaign to sell tax cuts that you don't need to apply for—you just get them automatically. They're going to spend $40 million of your dollars telling you how lucky you are—outrageous! I know that Australians would feel much more different if that money went to Foodbank rather than marketing.

The coalition will always stand for lower, simpler, fairer taxes, and that's why, in government, we delivered stage 1, stage 2 and stage 3 of our personal income tax plan. Under the former coalition government, we increased the threshold for the lowest tax bracket from $37,000 to $41,000. We also abolished, in the original stage 3, the entire 37 per cent bracket and reduced the 32 per cent bracket to 30 per cent. These reforms meant that more people would pay less tax over time. In fact, anyone earning between $45,000 and $200,000 would pay no more than 30c in the dollar. Well, that has gone. That's been smashed. That would have dealt with the pernicious bracket creep facing ordinary Australians right now. It would have meant you could have gone for that promotion, you could have taken on the extra overtime hours, and you wouldn't have had to pay any more tax to do it. Well, that has been thrown out the window.

We will always stand for lower, simpler and fairer taxes, and we will always stand by our principles. That's the reason we will support taking the 19 per cent bracket down to 16 per cent. But we deeply oppose Labor weaponising the politics of envy, in a cost-of-living crisis, after all the assurances in the last two years from the Prime Minister to Australians who were waiting for a tax cut—Australians who had looked at their budget, looked at the law, heard what the Prime Minister had said and made plans because they trusted their government. That trust has been broken, irrevocably. These are the Australians that the Prime Minister has let down. This is cynical politics, and it's focused on slicing and re-slicing an ever-diminishing pie, not growing the pie so that all Australians benefit.

For this reason, the Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Treasurer and I are all committed to taking to the next election a tax reform package that is in keeping with the original stage 3 tax reforms, committed to fighting bracket creep and enshrining aspiration, because strong leaders keep their promises, even when it's hard to do so. Our package will deliver lower, simpler and fairer taxes. It will fight bracket creep, enshrine aspiration into our system, reward hard work and support a strong economy where every Australian has the chance to get ahead. We will unite Australians, not pit them against each other. Our package will be delivered while providing for Australia's future security and guaranteeing the essential services that all Australians rely upon. The package will be fully costed and it will be ready to implement when we are elected. More importantly, it will be delivered, because we keep our promises.

The coalition's support for a tax cut should never be read as an endorsement of Labor's breach of faith. We will continue to hold this government and the Prime Minister to account for the commitments that they have made but that we know they are secretly planning to back out of. The Treasurer said as recently as this month, with regard to changes to negative gearing, 'Well, that's not something that we're proposing, not something we're considering, not something we are working up.' That sounds familiar, doesn't it? I think that's what we heard about the stage 3 tax cuts just months ago.

On tax settings for the family home, the Prime Minister also expects Australians to believe his denials, but he has shown just how reliable he is with the truth. These bills have been badged 'cost of living'. The coalition has been listening to Australians on the cost of living for more than 12 months, since the Senate established the Select Committee on the Cost of Living to inquire into that very issue. I can safely say that this is a government that has done nothing about it. Instead, it has been distracted on whatever is important to the government, whatever is important to Labor. It has had no plan to deal with the cost of living. It has focused on the wrong priorities—a $450 million failed referendum that anybody could have told you, months in advance, was going to fail. And yet they persisted. That was a promise they were happy to keep. But, unfortunately, the stage 3 tax cuts was one that they were happy to set aside. There has been an additional $209 billion in spending since the government came to government, while the cost-of-living committee has heard over and over again that a key way to reduce inflation is through reducing government spending, sending the right messages to the market so we don't have one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator—the Reserve Bank doing one thing and the government doing another.

We will support a tax cut. To those Australians that are struggling to put food on the table, that are struggling to rely on charity and on those breakfast programs at schools, that are asking for energy bill relief, that are going on payment plans, that are entering hardship programs with their banks, that are shutting the doors on their businesses or that are pawning their wedding rings to pay for school supplies: know that the coalition has heard you, that the coalition sees you and that the coalition is on your side. More can be done for you, and more should have been done for you. The opposition will continue to hold this government and this Prime Minister to account for the mistruths they have presented to the Australian people, and we will continue to stand for lower, simpler, fairer taxes for all Australians.