James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills 2024-25 and the supplementary additional appropriation bills 2023-24. Combined, Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2024-2025, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025 and the Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2024-2025 provide for funds from consolidated revenue for the 2024-25 financial year. Collectively these bills provide for expenditure worth $187.5 billion to support the operation of government for the financial year 2024-25.

The opposition will be supporting these bills; however, the budget handed down with these appropriation bills fails Australians. Australians needed a budget that got back to basics, and this was a budget that didn't. This means we needed a budget that restored our standard of living by finally addressing inflation and the pressures being felt by families at the check-out and in their energy bills, a budget that restored prosperity and created opportunity by supporting small businesses and helping young Australians into a home, and a budget that restored budget discipline and honesty by restraining spending, by bringing back the fiscal guardrails and a tax-to-GDP gap, and by delivering a structural surplus, not a windfall surplus.

Labor's budget failed all of these tests. It simply delivered higher spending. Prime Minister Albanese and Treasurer Chalmer's budget tried to put bandaids on bullet wounds rather than deliver structural solutions to the cost-of-living crisis that Australians are facing under this Labor government. This Labor government would rather give handouts to Australians facing energy and housing pressure than tackle the issues that are driving these pressures: the supply of energy and the supply of new houses. The fact is that Australians still won't see the $275 reduction in their energy bills that the Prime Minister promised 97 times before the last election. In fact, many Australians would need to see a $1,000 cut in their power bills just to get to the promised $275 reduction.

On a similar basis, the Prime Minister promised cheaper mortgages to the Australian people if he was elected. But three years later the average Australian householder with a mortgage is $35,000 worse off, and according to experts this budget is likely to simply keep those rates higher for longer. As Michael Blythe, the chief economist at PinPoint Macro, said, the budget 'adds to the higher-for-longer interest rate thesis'. And Cherelle Murphy, the chief economist at EY, said

… the Budget has thwarted the task of tightening the structural deficit.

It also undermines the Government's inflation forecast—which was lowered below the Reserve Bank's forecast and assumed to drop into the 2-3 per cent target band by the end of this year.

The government's energy bill relief is simply a 'political trick', according to former Reserve Bank board member Warwick McKibbin, and 'smoke and mirrors', according to KPMG's chief economist, Brendan Rynne. What no-one else has called it is a long-term solution to Labor's high energy prices. So this was a bad budget. It was a bad budget and the wrong budget for these economic times, and we will continue to hold the government to account for it.

In addition, the supplementary additional appropriation bill of 2023-24 provides for the general purpose of government for the fiscal year 2023-24. Appropriation Bill (No. 5) 2023-2024 provides a further $2.1 billion for the ordinary services of government, including $1.17 billion for the Social Services portfolio. Appropriation Bill (No. 6) 2023-2024 provides just under half a billion dollars for certain expenditures relating to non-operating costs, including payments to the states and local government. The majority of this, $452 million, is for the Department of Defence. This expenditure allows for a reclassification from 'operating' to 'capital'.

The opposition will be supporting the passage of these bills, as we have the passage of the initial appropriation bill of 2023-24 and the additional appropriation bill of 2024-25. I also note the second reading amendment to the motion circulated by the Greens to progress these bills. The coalition knows the important role that gas has as a transition fuel to net zero and will be opposing that amendment.