Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy has done it again. He is sometimes the truthteller of the ALP. He has gone out and admitted that the $300 off everyone's electricity bill is the ALP's attempt to buy lower inflation. It is just an extraordinary lack of understanding of economics. When people have more money in their pocket and they go out and spend it, prices go up and inflation increases. Supply and demand equals price: that is the basics of economics. I wish Senator Scarr were here because he could pass around his book so that a few people could read it. It is extraordinary that this is what this government has managed to come up with: an attempt to buy inflation reduction.

But we know that that's not going to happen because the $300 is going to every household. We've got a place in Queensland and a place in Canberra that we own. I stay here, and we rent our house in Sydney, so I've got three power bills. That's three households. Am I getting a $900 reduction? We don't actually know because it's not very clear. No-one knows who is getting it. Everyone is talking about the millionaires and billionaires who are getting it who don't need it, but how many times are they getting it? It might not just be $300. We know that there are senators in this place with seven houses. Jim Chalmers, the Treasurer, has got two. Is he getting 600 bucks? I think some of the Greens have got four or five houses each. Is that 1,200 or 1,500 bucks coming their way? Who knows? Like everything with this Labor government, the devil is in the detail, which doesn't exist, and the transparency with which they share their plans with the Australian people is non-existent.

Guillotine Thursday happened again today, as they buddy up with their mates to make sure that they can cover up all of their bad mistakes by not putting anything to the committee stage if they can help it, and ensuring that there is no oversight, no transparency and no integrity. There is just arrogance and hubris and a constant display of incompetence, with them needing to come back in and say: 'Oops, we made a mistake on that one. We'd better fix it up.' In the most recent case, the Attorney-General had to go and make some changes before the bill was even put to the House. But don't worry! We could have had a surplus of $10.3 billion if we weren't spending a billion dollars on the AAT rebrand. Never mind that.

What we do know about this budget is that it has gone down with every economist around the country like a lead balloon. Yesterday I heard the Minister for Finance say that, if you put 10 economists in a room, you'll come up with 10 different opinions, and I agree with that sentiment. It's usually the case. There's usually quite a big split among economist about what's going to happen and what they think the impacts will be going forward, but at the moment, for the first time I can recall, there seems to be universal damnation of this budget by every leading economist in this country. Not one has come out and said, 'This is a great budget.' They've said it's an election budget. They've said it's a budget that's going to lead to longer and more sticky inflation. They've said it's a budget that the Labor government thinks will be short-term gain but definitely long-term pain for the Australian taxpayer.

It is literally universal. I applaud the Minister for Finance and the Treasurer for their ability. It has never occurred before that every economist in the country thinks the budget is a stinker. And they are 100 per cent correct, because we have $315 billion worth of spending. This is a true Labor budget. It's another moment of truth-telling: tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend. Your income tax receipts are going through the roof. If you look through the budget estimates into the forwards, you are giving more and more of your money to this government. But going into the future, they are spending $4 more than that for every dollar. So they are contributing to this inflation. They are contributing to the issues the country is going to face long into the future due to the structural damage that they are continuing to do. The fact that they refer to their changes to the stage 3 tax cuts as cost-of-living relief shows their complete inability to understand that stage 1, stage 2 and stage 3—remember, there were other stages—were about tax reform. Those opposite don't understand what reform means. They don't understand economics. It's an absolute embarrassment and a shambles. The sooner we see the back of this government, the better.

Question agreed to.