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

And I remind those opposite that interjections are disorderly!

Instead of helping young Australians into their own homes, the Treasury itself has acknowledged that the tax change will result in 35,000 fewer homes being built and that rents are expected to increase.

We've seen in regional Australia a government which constantly punishes the people who live outside our capital cities, because by and large they don't vote for the Labor Party. We've seen it with water buybacks in the Murray-Darling basin, which stripped water out of productive use in the communities which feed and clothe our nation. We saw it with the cut to the Inland Rail project. It's quite extraordinary to cut the Inland Rail project and, in the very next breath, throw a few billion dollars at the suburban rail project in the Melbourne metropolitan area. This is part of Victoria's Big Build, which has been exposed as a home for rorts and corruption involving the CFMEU and bikie thugs, to the turn of $15 billion per year. The Big Build program has been independently assessed as having people working as traffic coordinators and then performing as strippers for the CFMEU members in the workers hut at night. What steps has the government taken to ensure that no federal taxpayer dollars are going to assist the rorts and corruptions on that program? I can tell you, in Victoria today, when they see the reports of $15 billion being wasted on CFMEU rorts and bikie thugs, they know that's hospitals and roads that weren't built and roads that weren't fixed. That is the lost opportunity when $15 billion of taxpayers' money is wasted in this manner. And now we find out this government is throwing more money at the suburban rail project, a project that has not even been assessed by Infrastructure Australia. Sadly, this budget is one which divides Australians more than ever before.

I want to refer to the capital gains tax changes and how they will impact on many of our farming families. I can promise you that, out of 150 members in the House, probably about 145 of them have no idea what it means. From my own perspective, I've been getting some advice today and over the last couple of weeks, trying to understand how this will play out. This is so complex and so damaging to Australian farming families. The government has no idea what it's just done. As the Victorian Farmers Federation has pointed out, more than half of the farming families in Australia will miss out on any concessions under these changes, and they will face massively higher tax bills at the time they try to transfer their properties within their families. Succession planning is hard enough as it is, when you have an asset-rich and, in many cases, cash-poor business. I don't think the government understands what it's done here. We want to see more families taking up life on the land, and these changes will lead to more corporate farms.

Today I visited a farm at Bungendore with the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Nationals. Paul, who's about 70 years old, and his daughter Hannah run a mixed-farming enterprise and a local butcher shop. They're worried about the impact of the capital gains tax changes on their family farm, which has been in the family now for three generations. The minister was asked about this in question time today, and she clearly doesn't understand her own government's changes, which do, once again, represent a broken promise to all Australians.

As I said, the Victorian Farmers Federation has publicly warned the government that more than 50 per cent of farmers will not receive a capital gains tax concession, because the concession thresholds have not been adjusted. They will pay massively higher tax bills when transferring their farm ownership to their children. What this will mean is that some farming families will have to sell off parts of the property, just to pay the tax bill, or, perhaps even worse, they won't make any succession plan at all. They'll wait till the farmer dies and then won't transfer the property in an orderly way. They'll seek to avoid the changes altogether. The VFF acting president, Peter Star, said the current thresholds no longer reflect the reality of modern farming businesses. He said:

Family farms have been locked out of concessions that were specifically designed to help them transition between generations.

Farmland values have increased dramatically over the past 20 years, but the thresholds governing access to CGT concessions have stayed frozen in time. We're working off a framework that is no longer relevant.

The government has been told that by the Victorian Farmers Federation, but it hasn't acted. The minister today, in her answer, demonstrated she has no idea what this is going to do to more than 50 per cent of farming families when they try to undertake succession planning in their businesses.

Budgets are always about choices. In this budget, the people in my community and throughout regional Australia know the Albanese government didn't choose them and didn't choose our farmers. There's a $52 million cut in this budget to the Future Drought Fund. Maybe the government believes we'll never have another drought—I don't know. At a time when the global conflict is driving up fertiliser prices, increasing diesel costs and putting pressure on food production around the world, the government has failed to provide a single new dollar to implement the unfinished National Food Security Strategy—not a dollar to implement it; it's quite extraordinary. They're clawing back funding from the Pest and Disease Preparedness and Response Program as part of more than $104 million in agricultural grant reductions. At the same time, the government has allowed the Supporting Communities Manage Pest Animals and Weeds Program to lapse, without any replacement.

Budgets are about choices, and the government didn't choose regional Australia. It certainly didn't choose our farming communities. Farmers are already battling—exploding populations of deer, wild dogs, feral pigs, invasive weeds and growing biosecurity threats—but Labor's response in this budget is to cut the preparedness funding and walk away from coordinated pest management. I'm the first one to acknowledge that state governments have a major role to play when it comes to natural resource management and feral animal control, but federal government has a critical role to play in controlling invasive species as well. Everyone accepts that invasive species are responsible for more extinctions in Australia today than climate change or any other issue. That's accepted by everyone who works in natural resource management, and yet here we have a government that is cutting funding for practical environmental management and invasive species control.

I'm going to finish where I started. There is a growing mood for change in our nation. We see it in the opinion polls, and everyone acknowledges these are very volatile times in the Australian electorate. The mood that I am sensing in my community is Australians feel like it's business as usual in parliament—in this place, under this Prime Minister—and that 'business as usual' is just more broken promises. They want their country back. After four years of the Albanese government, Australians are worse off—and they know that our nation is heading in the wrong direction.

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