Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I want to talk about a few things that came out of the budget this week, but, before I do, I think it's important, unfortunately, to remind not only this Chamber but also the Australian public that this budget is built on broken promises. It's important to remind this Chamber of that, because this is the whole issue that people have of trust in the House and trust in this institution of the parliament.

The Prime Minister was asked, on record, over 50 times before the last election—which was only 12 months ago, so we're not talking about a big period of time here—whether he would do the three things that he announced in this week's budget. You might say, 'Why was he asked about those three specific policies?' To at least give him credit for this, these were the three policies that the then Labor leader Bill Shorten took to the 2019 election. At least he had the decency to go to the Australian public and say, 'If elected, I am going to institute these three policies.' You may well argue and say, 'If those three policies were taken to the Australian public now at an election, then things have changed and the vote might change,' but we'll never know. We'll never know because this Prime Minister didn't have the guts, the transparency or the honesty to do that, and great shame on him for that. He doesn't just undermine his own credibility as Prime Minister, which I think he's done enormous damage to this week, and the Labor Party; he undermines the whole institution of the parliament because of how he's done that. I want to go through a few policies—in particular, the three policies that he did move this week with the budget—and I want to explain why I think the Australian public didn't vote for it last time and the damage that it will do, which the Australian public will never get to vote on before he institutes it through this parliament.

The first one is the capital gains tax. We now have one of the highest capital gains taxes in the world. If you are going to start a small business, a lot of small businesses—I know the member for Lyne would know many, and I know them myself—will invest in things and they, especially young people, will often forgo income. Why do they do that? Because they have this idea that they're going to create this asset that they're going to be able to sell and have a capital gain because of the work they do. There are countries like New Zealand, to name one—I name that because it's the closest country that is doing the exact opposite with capital gains. They're actually lowering capital gains taxes because they want to encourage New Zealanders to have a go.

It was said to me by someone yesterday that Labor wants you to take the risk, but they'll take the gain. They'll take the reward. 'You take the risk; we'll take the reward.' That's how it was referred to me, which is very apt. You take the risk but Labor will take the reward if you're going to have a go at trying to create wealth for yourself and your family. We want to encourage that. I say that unashamedly. We want people in our country to take a risk and get a reward for it. We want to encourage that, and this is doing exactly the opposite of that. There'll be ramifications of this that won't be seen today. They won't be seen next week. They won't even necessarily be seen within the next year or so. But over time the culture will change and the behaviour of people will change.

The other policy is negative gearing. This actually surprised me, though why would I be surprised? I was surprised by this. I was sitting in the budget lock-up. Page 158 of Budget Paper No. 1 says that, because of the tax changes that were announced Tuesday night, 35,000 fewer homes would be built in this country over the next 10 years. This is a policy that they sell by saying, 'We want housing to be more affordable and easier to access for young people to get into the housing market.' Their own documents refute that. Their own document refutes the idea that this is going to make it easier.

The other one, of course, is rents. The budget document also says that rents are going to go up. You can't make this up. The policies and the reasons they're saying are actually having the opposite effect. I don't think this is anything about what's going on in the economy. This is just about Labor's socialist ideology. They don't like people who are successful, they want to tax people who are successful, and they want to hurt people who are successful. I've got so much more to say, but I've run out of time.

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