Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It has been a very bad week for this unpopular marginalised, fractured Labor Party—the party who, when they were in government, ripped $15 billion out of family tax benefits. The Leader of the Opposition was then the minister for employment when he took 60,000 single parents off the parenting payment. That is the record of the Labor Party when it comes to families. Our record in government is one of delivering more jobs, a higher standard of living, more infrastructure and getting the budget back under control.

We are very, very proud of this budget because this budget has delivered for families, it has delivered for small businesses and it has delivered for all Australians. Let us take the first key theme in this budget, which is around small business and jobs. What we have done by giving a tax cut to some two million small businesses, some 96 per cent of all businesses in Australia, is that we have set them off on a pathway to further growth and job creation. When we add that together with the tax cuts and also with what we have done with the instant asset write-off, we have seen business and consumer confidence substantially lift since the announcement of the budget.

The other point about our small business and jobs package, which was some $5.5 billion, is that we have focused on those young people who are neither in employment nor in education. We have partnered with important groups like the Brotherhood of St Laurence. We have put a $200 million package in play which will allow young people to work with an organisation such as the Brotherhood of St Laurence and help develop their skills so that they can get in front of an employer. If you look at youth unemployment it is over double what it is for unemployment in the rest of the nation. If you go to parts of Tasmania, you can have youth unemployment above 20 per cent. In parts of Queensland it is just below that. In parts of South Australia it can be above that. We want to target those younger people who are neither in education nor in employment and help them get a job.

We have come up with a work experience program where people on income support can get up to 25 hours a week for four weeks of work experience where the employer will be incentivised by the government. We have not forgotten those mature workers, those over the age of 50 who may be out of work and on income support. The Restart program will provide a $1,000 bonus—and we have accelerated the payment of that amount—to an employer where the employer will get an incentive to employ someone who has been out of work and is over the age of 50. This Restart program is all designed to stimulate job creation. When you look at our record on jobs and small businesses and compare that to the record of those opposite, when more than 500,000 jobs were lost in small business under the Labor Party's term in office, and they had a rotating ministerial line of small business ministers, some six ministers, and five in just 18 months.

Then you have also got our second key theme in this budget, which is about child care and families. What we have done is focus on the Productivity Commission's report into child care, which said that the focus should be on middle and lower income earners—because they are the ones who are going to be most sensitive to the level of support that they get from the government for child care—in order to help them get back into the workforce If we as a country can lift the number of women in the workforce to where Canada is at, which is some six points up from where we are today, we will see a $25 billion productivity dividend to the Australian economy. Some low- and middle-income families can get up to 85 per cent of their childcare costs met in terms of support from the government, and it is a sliding scale depending on their income. We believe some 240,000 Australian families will either enter the workforce for the first time or spend more time in the workforce due to the greater access they will get to childcare payments.

Then there is our nannies program, which is designed to help people who may not have traditional hours of work—nurses, police officers, people who work in emergency services and people who work in our fire brigades. They can access the nannies support program during the trial period and some 10,000 children will get ahead. We were able to finance universal access for four-year-olds in kindergarten. Labor never funded that project going forward. It is we who are helping Australian families through job creation in small business and our other employment schemes and through our big $3.5 billion childcare package.

Then there is the critical piece in this budget—getting the budget back into the black. If you can get the budget back into the black, you can spend less money on the interest payments on your debt and spend more money where it counts—on infrastructure, hospitals, schools and roads. Through the measures in this budget we have reduced government spending from some 3.5 per cent per annum, which we inherited—real spending growth—to some 1.5 per cent per annum going forward. We have been able to reduce the $48 billion budget deficit we inherited to some $35 billion this year, some $7 billion in three years time and hopefully a budget surplus over that. We believe we have got our budget forecasts in exactly the right position where they are consistent with where the Reserve Bank of Australia is also at. By virtue of those measures designed to get the budget back into the black we can start paying back Labor's debt. Debt under us will be some $110 billion less over the next decade than it would otherwise have been under Labor. That is very significant.

We were also able to find money in this budget for the PBS. There is more than $1.2 billion extra for new drugs, including cancer drugs, on the PBS. We were able to find more than $1 billion of new money for our national security agencies and for our defence forces as we try to fight the scourge of terrorism. We have put great emphasis on developing northern Australia. We saw an announcement this week but in the budget there were some $5 billion worth of concessional loans designed to build the infrastructure in our north so it can become the food bowl of Asia, create jobs and capitalise on the wonderful three free trade agreements that this government has been able to conclude, when the previous government was unsuccessful.

Let us look at the record in this budget of small business and job creation, of helping families through child care and of supporting the budget repair job. You can also add the important measure that we have concluded an agreement with the Greens on—to get the pension on a more sustainable footing. Some $2.4 billion worth of savings have been achieved. The Labor Party have become irrelevant to the negotiations because they did not want to touch the pension even though some 170,000 pensioners will be $30 a fortnight better off. I wonder if the member for Sydney and the member for Jagajaga will tell the pensioners in their electorates how they have said no to a $30 a fortnight increase in the pension. I wonder if the member for Sydney, the member for Jagajaga and the member for Bendigo, who is sitting quietly behind, will tell the people in their electorates of their shameful record in government of job losses, of higher debt and the fact that Australia fell behind the rest of the world. Will they tell the Australian people and the people in their electorates about their plan to raid their hard-earned superannuation savings? I doubt it. They have on the books to increase taxes on superannuation contributions and earnings. The member for McMahon put out a press release in 2013 saying that there would be no changes to super for five years and you have your own policy, which the Leader of the Opposition does not even know, to whack 400,000-plus people with extra taxes on super.

This government is extremely proud of what it has been able to achieve in its time in office. We have got the budget back on track and we have improved the livelihoods of Australian families, but there is still so much more to do.

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