Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The shadow Treasurer talks a big game, but, as usual, I think the record talks an even bigger one. The shadow Treasurer talks about higher taxes and about real wages coming down, but the breathtaking part about that is that this is from a party that took tax increases to the last election and that kept wages down as a deliberate part of its economic architecture.

The shadow Treasurer is also trying to pursue the line that you run the budget like a family runs its budget. While there is merit in that argument, I think there is more merit in the maxim that a government should run the economy the way a good business is run. The problem for the opposition there is that there are two very different ways to run a business. As somebody who's actually run a business, I know that there are two ways to do that. One is to invest in your plant and your people to build productive capacity in your business for the long term, and the other way is to strip out profits, to put off the maintenance, to cut the investment and to slowly run the country—I mean the business—into the ground. The key lesson is this: not all spending is the same. There is good spending and there is bad spending.

The second thing I'd say is that the government understands that people are doing it tough. The fact that we're even having this argument is not the message that I want to get out to the community, because I know that in my community people are doing it tough, just as they are in most of the communities who are represented in this parliament. Inflation is higher than we would like. Cost-of-living pressures are real. But the argument contained in the motion from this opposition doesn't even withstand basic scrutiny.

First, the shadow Treasurer talks about rules, but inflation under the former government that he was a part of was already at 6.1 per cent and rising when we came to government. Spending peaked under the Morrison government at 31.4 per cent of GDP, and real spending growth was at 4.1 per cent, more than double what it is under this government. This government has delivered $114 billion in savings, and the $20 billion in savings found in the last budget update alone was as much as the former government managed across all of its last seven budget updates combined. So lectures from the opposition about this really are quite extraordinary.

Second, the Reserve Bank has made it clear that the unexpected increase in private demand has been what's contributed to inflationary pressure, and the idea there about the shadow Treasurer crowing about somehow getting the RBA to admit that aggregate demand is made up of both private and sector spending, as if that is some sort of economic revelation, only really explains why nobody takes them seriously on economic management anymore.

Third, the motion calls on the Treasurer to introduce measurable budget rules, which is remarkable coming from a party whose record and plans for the future show the complete opposite. They left black holes everywhere, and in opposition they went to the last election promising higher taxes and higher spending. So I'm not sure what rules you actually want us to follow. There are, of course, real pressures in the budget. Nobody can deny that. Our ageing population is—

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