Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

At no time in the last 10 years have I received so many emails and handwritten mail about a budget. And I have to tell you, very little of that was positive—very, very little. Whether it be private health insurance changes for older Australians, around limiting veterans' access to support, changes to trusts or capital gains tax or, indeed, negative gearing, overwhelmingly, people in my community have said to me that they feel betrayed by the government. In fact, the government went to the election just a year ago promising that they weren't going to change negative gearing and capital gains tax in particular. They didn't even mention trusts, discretionary trusts and testamentary discretionary trusts. A year in, they have completely changed their position.

My community overwhelmingly feels that, if the government are confident in their decision-making, they should take those proposals to an election, just as John Howard did when he was Prime Minister, with respect to the GST. He had the courage of his convictions to do that. We've seen the Prime Minister himself saying that he had said over 50 times he wasn't going to make the changes. A year in, the changes are made. Having been a member for 10 years now, I know that the wheels of government move very slowly. I wonder when the government actually went to the Treasury and asked for modelling with respect to capital gains tax and negative gearing, because I can't believe that it was just a recent aberration that happened in the last couple of months.

I'd like to read comments from my community to you on these issues. With respect to private health insurance changes, Geoff from Strathalbyn said:

I am disgusted with Labor's treatment of aged pensioners who have sacrificed much to pay private health insurance. At the age of 80, when health insurance is critical, I'm having to think about scrapping it to be able to afford power, water and food.

Andy from Craigburn Farm said:

This harsh and unfair policy will probably result in more senior Australians dropping their private health cover. Australians at the most vulnerable period of their lives, don't deserve this.

Jonathon said:

As someone who has had private health cover since my mid 20s, I now need to decide what else I can cut back should I wish to keep it. I urge you to press the Government on the unfairness of this cruel and short-sighted decision.

With respect to veterans health, my inbox is overflowing with correspondence from veterans, veterans' family members and, indeed, some of our RSLs about the changes. Macclesfield RSL wrote to me and said:

Immediate concern for many veterans in your electorate is the capping of Allied Health Care. This will result in many veterans' foregoing treatment with regards to Physio, Psychology, Occupational Therapy, and Exercise Physiology as examples. The new $5000 cap will mean that some veterans will have to decide between mental health and physical health, unless they go through another administration process to seek approval to get the treatment they need and deserve. As the Government spin doctors are hard at work trying to dress up the budget as a win for veterans.

What I think really went to the nub of Macclesfield RSL's communication with me is this:

If the same impediments were placed before other demographics of our community, there would be an uprising, but for those who wrote a blank cheque for their country for and up to the sacrificing of their life, we look away.

With respect to trust in the budget, I've received a huge amount of correspondence. Ryan said to me:

With respect to the proposed changes on trusts, I see this as an attempt to further tax a sector of people who are productive, hardworking and financially responsible. This Government appears to want to punish those who work hard, are economically productive and plan for their future under the guise of some kind of "Robin Hood" ethics.

Alan said:

I left school at 16. I am now 77 and a fully self-funded retiree. No handouts. Full health insurance. Now I'm the target to fund Labor's massive debt. Please voice our concern as to the mess this … Treasurer and Prime Minister are leaving us in.

Andrew said:

I am a 28-year-old. Rather than encouraging aspiration economic opportunity and personal freedom, I believe this budget further entrenches Government control while weakening intergenerational equity and the ability of younger Australians to build prosperous futures for themselves.

Ben, an estate lawyer, wrote to me and said:

My concern is that testamentary trusts are being caught up in a broader policy conversation about discretionary trusts, without sufficient recognition of their unique role in estate planning. The primary purpose of a testamentary discretionary trust is to protect an inheritance for children, widows, widowers, disabled beneficiaries and vulnerable adults after a person's death.

Jacqui said: 'It seems obvious to me that the government is making tax changes that favour younger voters at the expense of older voters. It's a blatant attempt to garner stronger support from a younger voter base.'

Let's go to capital gains tax, which we remember that the Prime Minister said he had no plans and he wasn't going to do it 'for the 50th time'. Andrew wrote to me and said:

I've never written to my local MP before—

I've got to say I've received so many emails starting with that—

I feel like this budget is a direct attack on me and my family. We made decisions and voted based on the promises made by Labor at the last election. These promises have been completely flipped and so has my family's ability to succeed. To make matters worse I have always hoped to be able to leave my kids with some kind of wealth once my wife and I pass. Now the Labor Government wants to get their hands on that as well.

Sally wrote:

I never write emails to politicians, but I'm scared. I'm trying so hard to save enough for retirement and pay off my mortgage, and it all seems impossible now. I'm a 57-year-old woman living in a single income household, doing my best to accumulate enough money to self-fund my retirement by the age of 65. The proposed CGT changes mean I won't be able to gradually sell down shares to fund my own retirement and will likely end up on the pension.

Scott said:

The package is presented as addressing the housing-investor tax bias and intergenerational unfairness. On the actual mechanics, it does close to the opposite—it tightens tax treatment for productive equity investment, while preserving, and in places concentrating, the structural advantages of leveraged residential property.

Paul said:

I'm saving for a house. Your budget just added years to my timeline.

Ari said:

I'm a 24-year-old middle-income earner and I don't own a home. I'm exactly the kind of person this policy is supposedly designed to help. I'm trying to build wealth through shares and Exchange Traded Funds because I can't access the housing ladder. The CGT reform hits people like me hardest. It raises the cost of the one wealth building option still available to me.

Hans said:

My son has been saving diligently with bitcoin for five years and has just recently accumulated enough for a deposit to buy a house. This is no longer the case with this CGT increase which now sets back the time for a deposit by at least another two years.

Honestly, they're maybe just two per cent of the emails I've received on this. This is the first time as a member of parliament I just cannot support a budget that's been handed down by the government, and that's because it's not built on promises and trust. It's the complete opposite.

Let's look at housing. I have three adult children. I want to see them get a house, just like I was able to get a house in my 20s. If we genuinely want to reduce the demand on housing, here are some policies that the government may decide to consider that would reduce demand without taxing Australians. Canada has actively reduced their immigration. They've paused short-term population growth, and they have alleviated pressure on housing and their public services. Their federal government has significantly slashed both permanent and temporary resident targets. Canada is a nation of 41 million people. They slashed their permanent resident targets by 20 per cent. It's capped non-permanent residents to five per cent of their total population—1.5 million. They've targeted in that international students, with strict caps on international student enrolments, and they've tightened the eligibility rules for foreign workers. This has seen a significant decline in their house prices. That's why they did the shift. They did that because they wanted to put their people first. And Justin Trudeau, he's hardly a right winger, is he? I mean, he was a left-wing Prime Minister who said, 'We didn't get the balance quite right,' and that's why they pivoted towards reducing migration. Why are we not doing this here? We're a population of 28 million. We had a net permanent migration in 2024-25 of over 300,000 people. Canada has 1.5 million temporary migrants. We have three million temporary migrants on our soil in Australia. Student visa holders make up around two 720,000 of those. Each of those need to live in a home. Now, if we go back to our student visa numbers, in 2016-17, the year I started, we had 343,000 temporary student visa holders. We now offer 720,000 and we wonder why we have a housing crisis.

When we look at permanent migration, if we go back to the numbers again—let's look at the year 2016—we had 206,000 people who came here as permanent migrants in 2016. If we go back to 2004, before Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister, when we saw the mass increase in house prices along with a mass increase in population, we had under 100,000 people coming to Australia.

I understand the Canadian government has reduced the capacity for people who are either temporary migrants or are overseas investors to purchase established dwellings—we have a temporary ban on that—but they can still purchase vacant land or new dwellings. If we want to reduce demand, why don't we do that? Why don't we say: in order to buy land or a new home or indeed an established home in Australia, you need to be a permanent resident or an Australian citizen. Why is it that, when the government introduced their five per cent deposit scheme, they didn't cap that just to Australian citizens? That's madness. We do that with HECS. We say you need to be an Australian citizen to access HECS—or a refugee. You can't be a permanent migrant to do that. So now the Australian taxpayer is actually on the hook for people who are not Australian citizens to get into the housing market with just a five per cent deposit. If they default, Australian taxpayers are landed with the mess; it's just insane. And by the way, 50,000 people who are not Australian citizens have entered that scheme.

If we genuinely want to make sure that our next generation is able to own a home, we need to be looking after ourselves first and we're not doing that. This budget doesn't do that. In fact, this budget punishes Australians for the benefit of everyone else. I would urge the government, if you genuinely believe that the capital gains tax and the changes to negative gearing—which you're applying to shares but you're somehow saying that it relates to housing affordability—then take it to an election. Just take it to an election. Do the honourable thing. Do what John Howard did. He had the courage of his conviction and he did it.

I can't tell you how many emails I've received but I think that the government needs to do better on this. For the first time in a decade, I just cannot support this budget bill.

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