Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027, the budget that was handed down recently. Budgets are important documents not just for the figures that a lot of people talk about—'We're funding this. We're paying for that. We're cutting this.' It really does set out some pointers and directions of where a government's true motivations lie, where their true philosophies lie and where they want to take the country.

In the history of political thought in recent times, there have been a lot of experiments around the world as to how to manage a society, how to manage an economy. There are those who argue that we should have a bigger government with more spending, more people employed by the government. The logical extension of this, of course, is socialism then leading to communism, where the government is all controlling and government spending is everything in the economy. On the other side of political philosophy, there is capitalism and the free market, where you sort of just let it rip.

Now, those philosophies at the pure ends of the scale are, of course, unworkable and unacceptable. I think the examples of eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s show what the ultimate impact of big government is. And the example in the United States—though it's a great country with great innovation—shows what a free market that goes too far without a safety net can be. So we need to decide, in Australia, where we are going to settle in these ideas of how big the government should be and what kind of a society we should be. What do we take from socialism, what do we take from capitalism, and how do we set the place up to be really vibrant and dynamic?

The history of Australia in recent times is really interesting. You had a Whitlam government that was quite a left-wing government and wanted a lot of government control in everything; a Fraser government that rejected those ideas but didn't make the reforms that it should have made; and a Hawke-Keating government that perhaps rejected the old Labor ideology—which has come back, by the way—of big government and tried to open Australia's economy up to something better, to the dynamism and the influence that a really strong and competitive global private enterprise can have. Hawke and Keating understood that, and they understood that was the way to get Australia going. Here we have a budget that is taking us in a very different direction from Hawke and Keating, expanding the size of government, making sure more people are involved in the government and employed by the government and really making it difficult for private enterprise to get ahead.

This budget contains some very significant changes to treatment in relation to the capital gains tax and negative gearing in particular. There are also some changes to trusts. But, in relation to CGT and negative gearing, these are big changes. I won't deny that. When big changes normally are proposed by a government, the courageous and decent thing to do is to seek a mandate by taking those changes to an election, as John Howard did in 1998 and Bill Shorten, to his great credit, did with similar changes to these at the 2019 election. Shorten lost the 2019 election, but he had the decency and the courage to take those changes to an election. This government did not do that. Changes are important, but so is how you make the changes and how you try and bring the Australian people along with you. If you really believe that you can sell these changes and that they're a good thing for Australians, don't sneak them in in the middle of a term. Take something this big to an election, and let's have a debate about it. That did not happen.

In relation to the changes themselves—firstly, capital gains tax changes have gone over like a lead balloon because, even though this government's trying to stamp it out, there is still a spirit of entrepreneurialism in this country. It's incredibly well exhibited in my electorate of Nicholls, where people have turned up from all parts of the world, often with nothing, and have used the natural resources there. In our case, it's irrigation water, but there are also the fine soils, the ability to grow fruit, the ability to process that fruit, the dairy industry and all of the ancillary businesses that strike up. When someone has a successful industry, all these private enterprise businesses strike up to service it. The change to the capital gains tax is the government saying, 'If you take a risk and if you're successful, we are going to tax you more as a result of being successful.'

There are a couple of problems with that. Firstly, it cruels aspiration. People might not be as willing to take a risk. But worse is this: do you know what the people who have a great idea and the inclination to take a risk with that great idea and set up a business are going to do? They're going to go to another country. We've already got the New Zealand finance minister saying, 'Hey, Aussie entrepreneurs, come over here.' That's not a good thing for a neighbouring country to be saying after a budget. It's basically saying, 'Your government is going to tax you for your success and your risk and we are not, because we want your ideas, we want your creativity and we want your appetite for entrepreneurialism.'

The changes to negative gearing are intended to make it easier for young people to get into the housing market, and I think that's an intent that we all share. That intent is best served by making sure that we improve the supply of houses. That will solve that problem more than anything else. I agree with the measures in this budget to provide $2 billion for enabling infrastructure for new housing developments. Our policy is to provide $5 billion and have a proportion of it in regional Australia. But I do support that part of the budget. I think it could be more, and we would do more, but I support that.

Go out and actually talk to housing developers, builders and the people who go in there. Once a council zones a paddock, takes it away from being agricultural or industrial and says, 'We're zoning it residential,' look at the time and money that it takes to get to the point where someone can actually pour a slab and build a house. It is too long, too hard and too expensive. We need to try and free that up a bit, make it quicker and make it more possible to get more blocks and more houses out there.

Many of those opposite and a lot of the ministers are having trouble explaining how the treatment of trusts works. I too am having trouble explaining to some of my constituents how the treatment of testamentary discretionary trusts works and whether or not they will be taxed. I think the government needs to go back to the drawing board and have a look at that. There's a lot of talk in the wash-up of this budget about intergenerational equality. What sort of Australia, what sort of a budget bottom line and what sort of tax system we leave to our future Australians is the real test of intergenerational equality. I worry about the Australia that we're leaving them.

We are leaving them with a tax system that doesn't reward them in the way that it should. The government's very fond of saying they're going to give working Australians some sort of tax back, which is not much money in the scheme of things. That tax that they get back, that money that they get back, is going to be eaten up in this insidious problem that we have had in the Australian tax system for years called bracket creep. As inflation rises, you go to your employer—or hopefully your employer comes to you and says, 'As CPI is rising, your wages need to rise to deal with the cost of living.' That wage increase pushes you into a higher tax bracket, and the government, while saying, 'We're giving you a tax cut,' grabs it back with the other hand.

This has been a problem with the Australian taxation system for a long time. It has meant that, as people become more senior and they try to work a bit harder and earn more money, the money just gets grabbed back by the government. I hadn't seen anyone with the courage to seriously do something about it until the Leader of the Opposition got up and announced what the changes around indexing tax brackets to inflation will be. It's courageous. It's bold, and I think, once we get out there and explain to the Australian people that it's their money—and you don't want the government grabbing it back because you had the temerity to become more senior, work harder and get a higher wage—they'll respond very positively towards that.

There are some regional impacts to this budget too that make a big difference to what the productivity of Australia will be. The cuts to the Inland Rail project are incredibly regrettable. That is a nation-building project—it should be a nation-building project—that has a great environmental benefit and a great productivity benefit. It was going to spring businesses up all across the extent of it. To end it at Parkes and not take it through to Queensland is very disappointing. There are significant cuts to infrastructure spending and the National Water Grid—even smaller things like the $191 million cut from pests and diseases and regional trade and drought funding and the $21.4 million cut from regional communications funding. This is all very regrettable.

I do give credit where it's due. After more than a year of us trying to highlight the lack of funding in key regional grant programs, the new rounds of the Growing Regions Program and the Stronger Communities Program have been funded. I support the government in that. For too long, councils and community organisations have been starved of any opportunity to even apply for funding, so I welcome that.

There has never been a clearer outline of competing visions for Australia's future. On one hand, you've got a bigger government where more people are employed by the public service, where more people are reliant on the government for their funding and where the government is in people's lives more than it has ever been with all of the cruelling of economic opportunity and private enterprise that that causes. Or you've got a different vision—the one of the pioneers who got off boats at the Port of Melbourne in the late 1940s and said: 'Where do I want to go? I want to go to Shepparton, in the Nicholls electorate, because that's where opportunity exists. You can go up there and, if you work hard, you can get ahead. You can make something because it's private enterprise. There are no government jobs up there, but if you get out and work hard on a farm, in five years you'll own your own farm.' We've seen waves of people come and do that, and it's been inspiring to see.

We want to be the sort of government that encourages that entrepreneurism; doesn't punish people for their aspirations about wanting to get ahead; makes sure we increase housing supply, which will be the thing that gets more young people into housing; and builds an Australia that is not veering towards socialism, which is something that we have seen not work in lifting people's ideas. I'll give you an example. I'll give you a quote from former senator Mathias Cormann. The reason he became a Liberal and on that side of politics is because of what he saw in East Germany versus West Germany. When you see the capitalism and the business and all the development and how that lifts people, he was inspired, and that's why he wanted to be on the side of aspiration, of free trade, of free enterprise, but with that crucial safety net to make sure everyone's dignity is supported.

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