Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

a deception of the Australian community. You would think there would be some sort of outrage from the Labor members in this chamber at the mere suggestion, but they know what happened 50 times over before the last election. They know, 50 times over, with red hot rage, what the Prime Minister insisted would never happen. And now they have introduced a budget, and they are all going to vote for it and become complicit in the deception, the untruthfulness, the deceit of the Australian community.

Think about it. Right now, so many Australian households are doing it tough. Australians have had their real wages fall backwards by three per cent under the Albanese government. An average couple with an average mortgage is $32,000 further behind under the Albanese government. There are small businesses that are desperately struggling. We have record small-business insolvencies in this nation. Eight go out of business every business hour of the day. We have a collapse in confidence, under the ANZ, Westpac and NAB surveys, and what Australian small businesses and Australians are looking for right now is a gasp of hope. But instead the Albanese government has given them a budget that they do not understand.

I talked about how they are taxing trusts on people with a disability. We know that the Treasurer has already called his own budget a confection, a misleading document. In his budget, he claims that, in the future years, the rate of inflation is going to be 2.5 per cent, but we know that he's released—

I know! We all question whether this is believable; I accept that. But that's okay; don't worry, Member for Nicholls: not even the Treasurer believes his own budget documents, because he's since released modelling assuming the impact of his capital gains taxes will be three per cent. We've seen consistent errors and failures on the part of this government because they don't understand the economy and they do not understand how Australians get ahead.

Just look at their own budget papers and what they show. Their own budget papers show—and they're sold on this deception—that it will help young Australians get ahead. Well, their own budget papers say that rents are going to increase under this budget. Think about that. I don't know about you, but, the last time I looked, most young Australians tend to rent before they go on to buy their first home. Those opposite are going to kneecap young Australians by increasing their rents. When they then go on and save for a deposit to buy their first home, those opposite will undermine and kneecap young Australians again by increasing the taxes that apply to capital gains. Then, if they dare do something as outrageous as work for sweat equity to get ahead—if they're going through employee share ownership schemes so they can advance their interests, accrue wealth and achieve that sense of aspiration that can only be achieved through work—the Albanese government has an answer. They're going to kneecap young Australians that are working to get ahead by taking up shares as part of their employment.

This morning, the Leader of the Opposition, the shadow minister for employment and industrial relations and I held a roundtable with people setting up startups and small businesses. They talked in particular about the role that share ownership schemes have in attracting the best talent to Australia to make sure that they can get the people they need to work in their businesses so that those businesses can grow and they can create the businesses that will not just be small businesses or startups today but grow into medium-sized enterprises and take on the world. But the Albanese government's answer to that is: let's take away the incentives for young Australians to get ahead. And that's before we even get to the great centrepiece of this budget.

The great centrepiece of this budget is housing. It's allegedly a budget that is focused on how it helps young Australians buy their first home. As I think I just heard the member for Fisher point out, what a joke! What a joke, because the reality is that the government's own budget papers themselves say that 35,000 fewer homes are going to be built. We can make a point about whether they tell the truth or not, but we know they certainly weren't deceiving the Australian people when they said they would lead to the building of fewer homes, and this is a problem. No matter how many new taxes they impose on Australians, whether it's a tax on aspiration, a tax on families, a tax on homes, a tax on rentals or a tax—and 'a tax' does sound an awful lot like 'attacks'; you could probably use them interchangeably—and an attack on the aspiration of the next generation of Australians, this government has no concern for the impact that its budget has on the future of the Australian economy.

What we saw revealed all of a sudden after the budget was finally handed down—because there are hundreds of pages of detail we needed to go through bit by bit—was this kernel or, as they call it in the video game industry, an Easter egg. An Easter egg is something that's designed to be hidden, but you can find it if you look hard enough. It's a common popular culture term. Well, there was an Easter egg of a 30 per cent death tax for those who have testamentary trusts. We've used examples in question time. We know the Prime Minister doesn't want to hear them. He doesn't want to see them. He wants to pretend they don't exist. But they exist to help families manage their estates and make sure that people can get ahead. Often, it's the most vulnerable whom they're designed to protect. I've used the example in question time and in this speech earlier already of Janet and her daughter with Down syndrome. What's the Prime Minister's solution? It is to pretend it doesn't exist?

The reality is that we know the Albanese government is seeking to kneecap the next generation of Australians to get ahead. So many Australians now have written to me identifying their concerns through our notthetax.com.au website, submitting their stories, including couples that have lost big chunks of their businesses. A couple in their late 50s wrote to me. They talked about how they've never claimed a single government payment—not one. They hold private health insurance and they paid $35,000 out of pocket for the wife's reconstructive breast cancer surgery because Medicare was grossly inefficient. They own one investment property, which is their financial security. They haven't increased the rent, but now they're going to get whacked with more and more taxes.

We have a constant stream of stories of Australians who are just trying to do the right thing and aspire to something greater for themselves and aspire to something greater for their children. But they're the ones who are targeted under this Labor government's budget. We all know the history: when Labor runs out of money, they come after yours. And that's the problem. The government has now fully revealed its character to the Australian community. They have fully revealed to the Australian community their priority, and it is not the Australian community. It is not a pathway where the next generation of Australians can get ahead. It is not a pathway where young Australians will look to the horizon with hope and dream big dreams, because all they can see on the horizon is more taxes from the Albanese government. It is a government that's not just not on their side; it's actively using the budget to kneecap their ambition, their aspiration and their future.

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