Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very grateful to have an opportunity to speak to this matter of public importance from Senator McGrath. When we are sent to these jobs by the Australian people, they would expect that we would seriously consider and spend serious time on the economic strategy of the Commonwealth government and regularly evaluate that, which is exactly what this matter of public importance is designed to do.

I would say that the central charge against this government's economic approach has been that it is a government for vested interests only, and, because of that, it hasn't had time to solve the great economic problems of the day. The reason that Labor have failed on inflation and failed on housing, to name just two things, is that they have spent all their time working out how they can feather the nests of the people that they are personally close to and the people that help them in their campaigns organisationally in a policy sense but also in a financial sense. They have used the great resources of the Commonwealth government to support their favourite fellow travellers. I believe that is ultimately why the government has not been able to put in the time and effort needed to kill inflation—which has been killed in almost every comparable country—or to fix the Australian dream and to make sure that younger Australians, those millennials and gen Zs, can actually get access to a first home.

Of course the budget strategy has been a disaster. They removed the break that we had on tax increases, and they have thrown in the bin the attempts that we made in the last parliament to deal with bracket creep. The re-insertion of a tax bracket, in this parliament, is one of the most regressive changes that we've seen. Who would have thought that in this parliament we would have such a low level of ambition that we would restore a tax bracket which we just abolished in the parliament before?

One of the central revenue-raising measures of this government—it's already in the budget—is the superannuation tax, but that has now been left to die by Dr Chalmers, the great doctor. He says he can't get it through, so he's not going to pursue this tax increase.

This was a broken promise from Mr Albanese and Dr Chalmers, who promised that they would not increase taxes on superannuation but felt that they had to because, of course, their budget doesn't stack up. Yes, it is true the government has delivered two paper surpluses. But, as we read in today's papers, they have locked the nation into a structural deficit which means that, over the longer term, there will be deficits and red ink as far as the eye can see.

This has been an ugly period. We are living through the greatest per capita household recession since the 1970s. Australians are feeling it. They are finding it harder and harder to keep going, and the government has seemingly no solutions here other than crony capitalism. We see that with the Future Made in Australia agenda. We see that with the National Reconstruction Fund. Who knows what we're actually reconstructing from. It's not clear to me why we have a national reconstruction fund when we haven't had a world war, because the last time we talked about reconstruction was when we had World War II, which was the biggest conflict of the 20th century.

Now we have a $15 billion reconstruction fund that is stacked with union mates on its board. We have the Housing Australia Future Fund, which spends more on executive salaries and on corporate affairs than it does on actual housing, and then we have the billions and billions of dollars of crony capitalism, where Dr Chalmers gives away taxpayer funds to his mates. We have—and it's perhaps the mother of them all—the idea that Minister Husic fancies himself as a white-shoe-wearing venture capitalist. He's not a white-shoe-wearing real estate agent from Queensland but a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley. He's going to give a billion dollars of taxpayer funds to PsiQuantum, an American company, to build a quantum computer, which he just decided to do one random day.

This has been the biggest disaster since the 1970s in terms of having a government engaging in maladministration of the economy. The Australian people are feeling it every single day. We have to get the country back on track, and the only way to do that is to have a Liberal government.