Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This suite of appropriation bills shows that the Albanese Labor government is prepared to make the decisions that count. It's an ambitious budget because it needs to be; the times demand it. The global context in which we find ourselves demands it. The bottom line of this budget is about providing financial relief for all Australians while undertaking the necessary reforms to create a more resilient economy for our future. It is about ensuring that Australians keep more of what they earn, and it is about ensuring that health access and affordability are a right, not a privilege. It's about ensuring that all Australians, younger and older, no matter their background, are able to get ahead and stake their share in the Australian dream.

It is now harder for younger Australians, because they find themselves in a historically unprecedented housing situation, to achieve the traditional milestones that Australia has prided itself on being part of being an Australian—owning a home, raising a family and saving for a more secure future. Our aged care system, on its current trajectory, will be unable to keep up with the rate of growth in population of older Australians, because they are one of the fastest growing populations. Younger Australians deserve access to secure housing and the opportunities to build their future—our future, Australia's future—and older Australians deserve the secure retirement and services that they have worked for.

The Albanese Labor government's vision is simple. It is one in which all Australians are able to contribute fully to our national economic life and reap the benefits of doing so. It's a vision in which no Australian is left behind, whereas what we've seen from those opposite can hardly be considered serious at all. They presented not an alternative financial proposition. It's been an unabashed demonstration of dog whistling.

The Albanese Labor government have proven time and again that we are the only serious and capable economic managers. We are the government of lower taxes and sound economic management. We are the government that delivered the first budget surplus in nearly two decades and then backed it up with a second. But the Albanese Labor government is also prepared to be upfront about our fiscal position in relation to global uncertainties. The economic repercussions of the conflict in the Middle East have been felt not only in Australia but in countries across the globe. Those repercussions have dragged on far longer than what we initially expected. Like other countries, we are confronted daily with the challenge of fuel security due to the unpredictability of the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. This budget seeks to shore up our future fuel security to prepare us for unexpected global energy shocks and disruptions, which are, more often than not, out of our hands. To this end, we have committed to purchasing more fuel and more fertiliser and to growing our national reserves of jet fuel and diesel to 50 days. We will make gas companies reserve 20 per cent of their exports for domestic use, because it simply defies moral logic that Australians should be left in the lurch when it comes to the natural resources that we own.

At the moment the Middle East conflict erupted, the Albanese Labor government acted to relieve pressure at the pump for everyday Australians. The Prime Minister, Foreign minister and others negotiated with our South-East Asian neighbours to ensure that we had security of fuel supply. We halved the fuel excise, reduced the heavy vehicle road user charge to zero and empowered our consumer regulator to be able to impose larger financial penalties on petrol companies that take advantage of the conflict and of their customers and artificially inflate their prices, because everyday Australians should not have to pay prohibitive sums in order to drive to work.

Yes, it's an ambitious budget, and, yes, we are making the hard decisions now in order that future generations won't have to. With $63.8 billion in savings, this budget constitutes the largest savings package ever. What this means is that debt will be lower and our budget position will be stronger year on year in the medium term because it is a deliberate principle of this budget that we save so that we can pass on the benefits in tax cuts to everyday Australians. This budget will see Australians receive more tax cuts from 1 July this year, in addition to the previous three rounds of legislated tax cuts, to help relieve cost-of-living pressures. This includes a $250 tax offset and a $1,000 instant tax deduction for working Australians. The $250 tax offset will benefit 13.3 million workers, including 880,000 in my home state of South Australia, while the $1,000 instant write-off will benefit 6.2 million workers, including 450,000 in South Australia.

We will also ease cost-of-living pressures by making access to health care easier and more affordable. The government has in this budget committed $1.8 billion over five years to our urgent care clinics, making them a permanent part of Medicare. With 135 urgent care clinics across Australia and more being built, this will mean that four in five Australians will live within a 20-minute drive of one. In South Australia alone, urgent care clinics have delivered over 172,000 bulk-billed visits since the network's inception in 2023. In the Marion Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, in my electorate of Boothby, there have been nearly 31,000 visits since November 2023, when it opened. The proliferation of urgent care clinics will mean reduced wait times for patients seeking urgent care, while also taking pressure off our emergency departments and services.

The budget also commits an extra $25 billion in addition to the $220 billion already invested in our public hospitals over the next five years. In South Australia, we expect to receive $2.7 billion in hospital funding in the next financial year and $3.3 billion by financial year 2029-30. And Australians have already saved more than $2.3 billion with cheaper PBS medicines, with a maximum price of $25 per script or $7.70 for pensioners and concession cardholders. In Boothby, that's over three million cheaper scripts, and across South Australia that's over 31 million.

We're investing in more bulk-billing GPs, with now almost 3,800 fully bulk-billing practices right across Australia, and a projected nine out of 10 GP visits will be bulk-billed by 2030. The reality is that Australia is experiencing a rapidly growing older population. We have more retirees and comparatively fewer working-age taxpayers. Our demographics are changing, so our service offerings need to change as well. We know that the demand for aged-care services, in-home and residential, is growing and will continue to grow. A new aged-care home needs to be built every three days for the next 20 years in order to be able to provide the services our cohort of older Australians will need. Currently, we're not meeting that demand, and the entire system risks collapsing under its own weight.

Older Australians will benefit from the Albanese Labor government's commitment to expanding and improving the aged-care system. This will mean more aged-care beds, more packages and better care. It will mean 5,000 more beds year on year. It will mean being able to build and maintain quality residential accommodation. It will mean a Support at Home program that is fairer and more affordable, with faster and improved assessments and shorter wait times. It will mean free personal-care services—like showering assistance, dressing and continence support—alongside free clinical care. It will mean an expansion of the end-of-life pathway to provide dignified care for older Australians in their final months. And it will mean 20 additional Specialist Dementia Care Program units and an expansion of the Hospital to Aged Care Dementia Support Program, which will provide crucial transitional support for older Australians going from hospital to residential aged care.

We have also made, unsurprisingly, housing a crucial plank of this budget. Homeownership is a key part of the Australian dream, but for the past four decades this country has not built enough houses to keep up with demand. The tax settings that benefited investors over owner-occupiers drove housing prices up and up. In 1990, an average Australian home cost approximately 2.6 to four times the average wage. Now it's anywhere between 10 to 16 times the average wage and utterly unaffordable. No wonder we hear from first home buyers and young people that they don't think they will ever own their own home. That isn't good enough. So, in addition to all we have done in housing in the past four years, we're doing more.

The government has announced in this budget a $2 billion investment in the enabling infrastructure that will unlock much needed housing development. The Local Infrastructure Fund will assist local and state governments and utility companies in closing that last mile that has often posed a barrier to housing completion. It will mean that practical work can begin right away on water, roads and utilities, which will enable an additional 65,000 new homes to be built over the next 10 years. In South Australia, local and state governments and utility providers will be eligible for more than $130 million in funding. We've already helped 250,000 first home buyers get into housing through the government's five per cent deposit scheme, but we recognise that they continue to be inherently disadvantaged by a tax system that works against them.

First home buyers, owner-occupiers, have been outcompeted in property purchases by investors who are subsidised by the taxpayer. The investor can pay more for a property, knowing that any loss they will make will be compensated by the taxpayer. That's not fair, and that's why we're making the tax system fairer by removing negative gearing on established builds and changing the way capital gains are taxed. Because Australians that want to buy their own homes should not be put in a position where they will be outcompeted by an investor who is able to exploit tax advantages. What this means is that, for new investments, negative gearing can only be applied to new builds, and capital gains will be adjusted for inflation before being taxed at a minimum rate of 30 per cent.

These reforms will mean that more Australians can get into homeownership and younger Australians can get into the housing market, and any new negative gearing investments will go to building new homes, which will increase the housing stock. The result will be a boost in housing supply by another 30,000 homes over the next decade, and we will see 75,000 more homeowners being supported into the market. The reforms are about levelling the playing field and giving every Australian the opportunity to get their foot in the door of owning a home—a fair go for all Australians.

This budget is perhaps one of the more important budgets in recent times, because we find ourselves at a juncture, at a crossroads. While the opposition continue to distract themselves with their search for political identity, culture wars and negativity, we are acutely conscious of the fact that we must act now on these critical issues, or it will be too late: we will let the housing crisis run away from us, which will mean that young Australians will certainly never be able to afford to buy their own home; we will let the cost of living run away from us, which will mean reduced standards of living and poorer health outcomes; we'll let the aged-care crisis run away from us, which will mean older Australians will no longer be able to receive the quality care that they need and deserve; or we'll let the global fuel crisis run away, which will have severe impacts on our national productivity. But we're not here for that; we are here to do the right thing.

This is a responsible budget, a reforming budget, a budget designed to promote economic resilience. It's a budget for all Australians, young and old, no matter your background. And it's a budget that recognises the urgency of the moment, a moment that the Albanese Labor government is determined to meet. I commend these bills to the House.

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