Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I must say to anyone listening at home: you must feel like you're in a parallel universe when you hear contributions from the government saying that everything's rosy, everything's great, and Australians have never had it better. In the real world, when you get out there and you talk to Australians, they're angry, they're frustrated and they've been left behind by a government which has made them worse off in just four years. The message I get, everywhere I go, is that Australians want their country back.

This week's Mood of the Nation poll found that 66 per cent of Australians believe the country is heading in the wrong direction—that 66 per cent of Australians believe our nation is not on the right track. And who could blame them? They have experienced a declining standard of living. They have seen, over the last four years, 15 interest rate rises. The average Australian mortgage holder now is paying $25,000 per year more in interest than they were before the Albanese government came to power.

And, up against those headwinds, families would have turned on the TV on budget night and found out that they had been misled repeatedly before the 2020 election. The voters won't forget, because the Prime Minister himself, in a very snippy little interview where his glass jaw broke in front of the assembled press gallery, said he'd 'told you 50 times'—50 times—that he was ruling out changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing. After the federal election, in May last year, the Prime Minister continued, when he said: 'We have a mandate for what we took to the Australian people. That is our mandate.' They're his own words: 'We have a mandate for what we took to the Australian people. That is our mandate.'

The Prime Minister has no mandate for the changes announced in the federal budget which hit small-business owners and which hit our farming communities. And he knows it. The Prime Minister knows that he's broken his word. He likes to say, 'Now I've changed my position,' or some other little weasel words, to try and get around it. He's fundamentally broken a promise to the Australian people, and they won't forget it.

Why can't this Prime Minister just be honest? Just be honest with the Australian people and say: 'I did break my promise. But these are my new policies, and I'm going to take them to the next election and give you a chance to vote on them.' That's kind of how a democracy is meant to work: you have a policy position; you take it to the voters; the voters decide; and you get a winner. What you don't do—unless you're a little bit gutless—is to mislead voters and tell them 50 times you're not going to do something, and then, at the first available opportunity, break your word and give no-one a chance to vote on it.

This is going to hang around those opposite like a dead albatross, all the way to the next election. The member for Chifley shakes his head. And they've got every right to be confident, because they've got 94 members of the House of Representatives. They think they're on a winner. I can tell you: when you get out on the streets and you listen to people, they know they have been misled, deceived, by a prime minister who cannot be trusted with anything he says, going forward, because he told us 50 times he wasn't going to change capital gains tax or negative gearing, and he's done exactly the opposite without having the fundamental decency to take it to the Australian people. In his own words—'We have a mandate for what we took the Australian people. That is our mandate'—he has no mandate for what he's done in the budget.

The Prime Minister also told Australians—this is probably the funniest thing I've heard out of him in recent times: 'My word is my bond. I believe that, when you go to an election and you make commitments, you should stick to them.' It's good advice for any leader. He also said, 'I will lead a government that keeps its promises.' So why would any Australian believe him in the next election when he rules out other tax changes? They know he'll just conveniently change his mind after election and do whatever he wanted in the first place. This is Bill Shorten's 2019 election campaign being delivered by the current Prime Minister, but at least Bill Shorten had the guts, the intestinal fortitude, to take it to the voters. We even had the member for McMahon saying, if you don't like our policies, don't vote for them. Australians don't need to be told twice; they didn't vote for them. That is why this is such a fundamental deceit of the Australian people—because they didn't actually seek a mandate for this. The Labor Party knew that, if they'd sought a mandate, what happened in 2019 would happen again, because, if people didn't like their policies, they wouldn't vote for them. They always planned to do this. That is the disgrace that is at the very fundamental core of the budget that was delivered by the Treasurer only a couple of weeks ago.

Instead of a plan for the future of regional Australia, in the budget we saw more broken promises, higher taxes, more debt, lower living standards and fewer homes for Australians. The budget papers themselves say that, under the changes being delivered by this government, 35,000 fewer homes will be built. That's in their own budget papers.

We're facing a decade of deficits worth $150 billion, but the greatest deficit isn't $150 billion; it's the deficit of trust that now exists between this Prime Minister and the Australian people. A hundred and fifty billion dollars is a lot of money, but the deficit of trust that exists now between this Prime Minister and the voters of this country has been widened in a manner which is unprecedented in my time in this parliament, and that's 18 years. To see a prime minister so deliberately mislead the Australian voters and then pretend nothing happened is quite extraordinary.

The deceit which goes to the very heart of this budget is these mealy-mouthed claims from those opposite that it's about intergenerational equity, but it's actually about intergenerational fraud, and they know it. The negative gearing treatment in the budget and the way it's been grandfathered to protect people like me and people like the Prime Minister but then pull up the ladder of opportunity for young people in this country is quite extraordinary—again, when you acknowledge that no-one took it to the election in the first place. The Prime Minister, like me, has worked for a long time, purchased a family home and then been in a position to invest in an investment property, have it negatively geared and have the benefit of that tax treatment. But what happens now is that people who hadn't made those investments prior to budget night no longer have that opportunity in the same manner which the Prime Minister and I have enjoyed throughout our working careers.

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