It gives me pleasure to speak to this motion put by the member for Forde. Following the budget, I spent a week out in the community reflecting upon it. I have formed an image where Labor has now absolutely taken control of the economy with this budget. You can’t intervene. You can’t get your fingers this deep into the budget without hitting your fingers. I’m picturing a Nigella Lawson kneading into a big cookie dough bowl, just putting her fingerprints all over it. That’s how I see this economy now.
There are ways to look very clearly at the impacts of this budget. Let’s look at the impact on jobs. Labor came in a year ago with the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. We hear a lot about the decade of delay. We don’t often hear about a couple of these key facts, like the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. Labor also came in with the rate of welfare dependency at its lowest level in 30 years. That was achieved just prior to the pandemic. It’s a little thing the Treasurer doesn’t speak a lot about.
On top of that, across the last term of the LNP government, two million jobs were created. If you compare that to the budget, what the budget predicts is that there will be 175,000 job losses across Australia. So there’s a very clear difference from a government that created jobs, that oversaw one the greatest creations of jobs we have seen in our time, and had the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years to a government that is confirming in its second budget that 175,000 job losses will take place.
Let’s look at tax. Across the last term, the coalition reduced taxes for more than 11 million Australians. In the 2021-22 financial year, a person earning $90,000 was paying over $3,000 less in tax. The stage 3 tax cuts that we planned for ensured that 95 per cent of taxpayers would face a marginal rate of no more than 30 cents in the dollar. Small businesses had their tax rate reduced from 30 per cent down to 25 per cent, which was the lowest rate in 50 years.
Again, there’s a stark comparison to what we’ve seen in this budget. We’ve seen a tax on farmers and fresh food, a tax on truckies, a tax on energy producers and higher taxes on low- to middle-income Australians. There’s a very big difference in approach, a very big difference in intention and a big difference in consequences that we will see from this.
The Prime Minister was given two cracks at this cherry. I’m happy to say I’m going to see if I can do it in one here today. Yes, Australia’s core inflation rate is higher than the UK, higher than the US and higher than the EU area. It’s higher than every G7 nation. Goodness me, that wasn’t that hard to do! I don’t know why this fact can’t be addressed. Oh, maybe it could be! There’s the simple point that there are things that you can do about inflation, and different countries have approached it differently. When we look at Australia’s response and see our inflation higher than those countries, perhaps it’s worth asking what are the things that have created that? We can’t continue to talk back to external influences that are driving inflation. As the RBA governor has well and truly confirmed, the drivers of that inflation have moved internally; they are domestic drivers now. When we see $185 billion of additional spending in this budget at a time when inflation is this high, when economists laughingly refer to this as a stimulus budget, that’s exactly what we’re doing, we’re pouring fuel on the fire.
Where does this budget leave us? I saw a fantastic cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s not usually a paper that is very friendly towards this side of the House. There’s a picture of a little girl chasing a balloon that was floating away from her. It’s out of her reach. She’s chasing it, and the balloon is shaped like a house. Of course, housing is out of the question for that next generation. It’s getting worse and worse. And what is the wind that is blowing that balloon away? It’s 1.5 million new Australians coming in in the middle of a housing crisis.
