Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

From listening to a number of speakers from the government side in this debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Personal Income Tax Plan) Bill 2018 you'd think that the centrepiece of this budget was delivering tax cuts to working families. Time after time they've been saying that this is the priority of this government, but, quite frankly, everyone knows that that is a myth. Everyone knows that the centrepiece or the signature policy of this government is the $80 billion tax cut to big business. They don't like talking about health, education or pensioners, because they are all cuts. What is happening to families out there are all cuts.

This is an exercise in smoke and mirrors. They're trying to say that they are going to give these tax cuts from 1 July this year. They are projecting our economy for another seven years. They are saying that they are going to make this plan and that wage growth will average 3½ per cent. No economist has come out to endorse the government on any of that. Not even the conservative media have come out with that—not even Sky News. Nobody has come out to say that this is based on any real or proper foundation. This is a pie in the sky.

They are trying to sell as the centrepiece of the government's budget plan these tax cuts for Australians. If that's really what it is about, we have a far better plan for them. The Leader of the Opposition in his budget in reply speech actually spoke of it. We will double what the government is proposing to put out on 1 July this year. We would deliver double that by 1 July 2019. What the government is talk about is a modest increase of about $10 a week for workers in this country. We're not going to stand in the way of any increase, but that is a pretty modest increase. You only have to spend a little bit of time at McDonald's to realise it's going to get swallowed up pretty quickly, particularly if you have got a family.

In addition to that, they're going to project what the economy is going to be like effectively for the next seven years. No reputable economist that I've read has come anywhere near that and given it any credit. They say that you don't know what will occur that far out. I will go to what the IMF, for instance, had to say about it. In terms of the budgetary position, they said:

Decisive action is needed now to strengthen fiscal buffers, taking full advantage of the cyclical upswing in economic activity.

That's the IMF's position: think about where you are now and make some plans for the future by having that buffer. I would have thought that it was almost conservative logic to do something like that. I think John Howard had a bit of a view about that at one stage, although he didn't want to spend much on infrastructure when he was there.

Also, talking about conservative commentators, Peter Martin, the economics editor in The Age,said:

We've been given a budget for the good times that rewards us as if those good times will last, even though they may not.

The world did not see the coming of the global financial crisis in 2008. We all saw when Lehman Brothers went under, and then it started cascading. It caught out just about every international economy, except Australia. I think we handled that pretty well. The member for Lilley was regarded very highly over the way he took decisive action and actually insulated Australia's economy from that. You never hear people over there talk about the global financial crisis. What they do like to talk about is debt and deficit.

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