Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The total effect of these decisions on last night's budget, an effect that will resonate through the economy and impact on jobs and growth, is to lose $430 million over the forward estimates. That is a cost that has to be paid by some of the most vulnerable. The impact on jobs and growth is going to be manifest because when you ask multinational firms to pay their fair share of tax that does not have an adverse effect on Australia's economic growth, but when you cut back on supports for pensioners and when you cut the pension that does because those who are at the bottom of the income distribution spend everything they have got and that goes back into boosting demand and boosting jobs. If you cut back on supports, then you are going to be hurting the most vulnerable Australians.

The Prime Minister said before the election: 'We will be a no surprises, no excuses government.' He said:

We are about reducing taxes, not increasing taxes. We are about getting rid of taxes, not imposing new taxes.

Yet the budget last night did precisely the opposite: it is cutting back on supports for vulnerable Australians today and cutting back on investment for tomorrow. We on this side of the House are all for infrastructure investments. We are proud that we took Australia from 20th in the OECD to first in the OECD for infrastructure investment.

But good infrastructure investment requires cost-benefit analyses and requires investment in urban rail, if it passed a cost-benefit analysis, not simply investing in the favourite boondoggle project of the National Party. We are going back to the days of the Roads to Recovery rorts and the like with the government clearly picking favourite projects, rather than allowing expert cost-benefit analyses to guide it.

We are seeing a lack of investment in another critical form of infrastructure, the National Broadband Network. Fibre-to-the home is fundamental to productivity of businesses and individuals, and to jobs and growth in the future. If we cut back on that form of infrastructure, future Australians will be the poorer for it.

Future Australians will be the poorer too for the budget's inability to tackle climate change. The Treasurer talked a lot last night about the importance of intergenerational equity and thinking about the future. Yet the budget is going to be a risk to the future growth prospects of Australians, because it utterly fails to deal with the single challenge of climate change—trashing an effective, efficient, cheap means of dealing with carbon pollution, an emissions trading scheme, in favour instead of command and control direct action, which no serious economist believes can do the job.

The cost to jobs and growth of not dealing with climate change down the track will be significantly higher as a result of this government's decision to not address climate change. As the developed country with the highest carbon emissions per head, we cannot simply put our heads in the sand on this one.

This really is a budget for the cigar-chomping plutocrats, rather than for the battlers. If you are a mining billionaire, you have done well out of the budget. If you are a millionaire family expecting a child, congratulations to you: your new age of entitlement is just beginning.

If you are a person like 42-year-old Genise, who has tunnel vision and learning problems, including dyslexia, and receives a part-disability support pension and rent assistance, this is a budget that is not doing much for you. Genise works sorting mail and used to work in a childcare job. She is a great Australian. She won three gold medals for swimming in the 2007 Special Olympics, but cuts to pensions will affect Genise directly.

Meanwhile somebody with a name close to Genise, Gina, will do very well out of this budget, thanks to the cut to the mining tax which is projected, according to the Treasurer, to raise $1.8 billion in just 2016-17 alone—a larger amount than the special levy on high-income earners is expected to raise in that year.

I am deeply concerned that, after a generation of rising inequality where the billionaires have done much better than the battlers, this budget will only serve to widen the gap. Australians need serious tax reform, not the piecemeal reforms being put forward by this government. They expect fair tax reform in which everyone will play their part, rather than slugging the poorest and the most vulnerable in order to not even manage to get the budget into the situation it was in when this government took over.

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