Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last night the Treasurer's budget provided further cost-of-living support while building Australia's future. That means more tax relief, more energy bill relief, more investment in housing and education and a record investment in Medicare and cheaper medicines while improving the budget position by $207 billion compared to what the previous government had projected. Every single Australian taxpayer gets another Labor tax cut next year—unlike the coalition's tax cuts, which only would have gone to the very highest earners. Combined with our first round of tax cuts, the average Australian worker will earn a tax cut of $43 per week or more than $2,200 per year.

Mr Dutton immediately announced that he'll oppose tax relief for working families. Mr Dutton wants to cut everything except your taxes. This morning he said on Radio National that he admires Tony Abbott's approach to the budget, which we'll all remember was to break promises and make the biggest cuts to Medicare and education we've seen in this nation's history. We know he's more interested in what's good for Gina Rinehart than what's good for every Australian. Under Mr Dutton, Australian families will be worse off. They've proven that by opposing Labor's tax cuts for every taxpayer, and it's not once but twice they've done that. Mr Dutton will cut Medicare to pay for his nuclear reactors, but he won't cut income tax for every taxpayer. Unlike Mr Dutton, Labor is strengthening Medicare in the budget, making nine in 10 GP visits by 2030 free.

Unlike Mr Dutton, who has committed to scrapping Labor's right to disconnect, ending work from home and even scrapping penalty rates, we are taking more action to grow wages and strengthen working rights. We are banning non-compete clauses that are stopping more than three million Australian workers switching to higher paid jobs. Independent research shows that'll lift the wages of the average worker by over $2,500 a year. The big business council was complaining last night that they don't like workers having freedom to change their jobs even more. Our priority is ensuring working families earn more and keep more of what they earn. Mr Dutton wants you working longer and harder for less.

You can contrast the Albanese government's budget with the absolute shambles on offer from the opposition. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, has just spent a month lurching from one scandal to the next. First, his mystery share purchases are still a mystery. Mr Dutton still refuses to explain his bank share purchases made the day before a government bailout in 2009. How much money did he make? We still don't know. Then there were the stories about Mr Dutton's secret $30 million property portfolio—by the way, he said that means you're not particularly rich—which might explain why he has voted against every single housing affordability measure introduced by this government.

Next up, while Queenslanders were pulling together to protect their communities from Cyclone Alfred, Mr Dutton secretly flew down to Sydney to attend a fundraising party at the mansion of one of Australia's biggest wage thieves. When Mr Dutton's own community was filling sandbags, he was a thousand kilometres away down south filling money bags. Then he declared war on work-from-home arrangements, saying he would force people back into the office five days a week, punishing regional workers and those in the outer suburbs and working parents juggling jobs and careers. Then Mr Dutton had another thought bubble. He threatened to break up the big insurance companies. But, within days, his own shadow Treasurer, shadow finance minister and deputy leader all ruled it out. Then Mr Dutton doubled back, saying that divestiture was still on the table, only to be contradicted again just hours later by the shadow Treasurer.

Then Mr Dutton floated a referendum to give himself the power to deport five million Australians who were dual citizens. After two years of complaining about how much referendums cost, he decided on the spot that he wanted another one—and, yet again, his own frontbenchers contradicted him. One Liberal figure told the ABC:

It's insane, and none of us were told about this.

Another said:

We need to be focused on the cost of living and not hypothetical changes to constitution.

Even former coalition Attorney-General, George Brandis, called it:

… as mad an idea as I have heard in a long time.

Within 12 hours of Mr Dutton doubling down on that idea, Liberal MPs were being told internally that they shouldn't mention Mr Dutton's referendum anymore.

This was all capped off by the shadow Treasurer's train-wreck interview on Insiders just last weekend, where he repeatedly refused to say how much their nuclear policy would cost. He didn't know their migration policy, their energy policy or their defence policy. You can see why he refused to debate the Treasurer when he folded like a deck chair under a gentle line of questioning from David Speers. This past month was a warning to all Australians of what's to come if Peter Dutton ever gets the keys to the Lodge: no policy, no vision and no economic plan—not one that he's going to share with you, but one that he's got waiting for you if are to elect him. He has said there will be $350 billion worth of cuts to services that he won't tell you about until after the election. Other than his $350 billion worth of cuts to essential services and his $10 billion for taxpayer funded lunches for bosses, Mr Dutton has announced not one other policy.

The shadow minister for finance, Jane Hume, has said—and Peter Dutton has also said—that people will be forced back into the office five days per week because, and I quote:

It has become a right that is creating inefficiency.

She then cited a study from Stanford University to support her claim. If she had actually bothered to read the report, she would have seen that it said, and I quote: 'Working from home one or two days a week improves productivity.' Can you believe it? It's taken three years for them to come up with a single policy that's based on a report they didn't even read, let alone understand. There has been massive blowback against this because of the negative impact, especially on working parents and women. Then, when Mr Dutton was asked about this, he said—and this is a clanger—and I quote: 'There are plenty of job-sharing arrangements.' How tone-deaf can you be?

Mr Dutton thinks that, if a working parent can't be in the office five days per week, they should just go back to working part time. He wants to go back to the days of old when many women were forced to drop out of the workforce when they had to have a child. It's just shocking. But it gets worse. Their policy will supposedly only apply to public sector workers at first. But we all know big business will follow their lead and demand everyone else back to work five days a week. New data reveals that one in three working Australians work at least one day per week from home, 320,000 people work partially from home because of caring responsibilities and 600,000 people work partially from home to save time and money from commuting. So those one in three workers are saving almost $5,000 a year on transport, parking and other savings. That is how much you'll be worse off each year if Mr Dutton gets to fulfil his dream of killing off work from home.

Whether it's his cuts to Medicare and energy bill relief or his policy of ending working from home, everything Mr Dutton says or does takes money out of the pockets of Aussie families and puts it in the pockets of his paymasters, the billionaires like Gina Rinehart and Justin Hemmes. When Peter Dutton makes cuts to please his donors, it's Australians who pay.