Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I had a speech I wanted to roll through, but I've instead decided I'm going to respond with gusto to the previous speaker, the member for Gippsland. I had to sit through his canard of falsehoods and I figure it's important to respond to some of the stuff that he said.

It's a very seductive suggestion that has been put forward by him, which is: don't make changes on negative gearing and capital gains tax; go to an election and put those changes; don't listen to the fact that people want to have a roof over their heads. I believe, firmly, housing is a human right. People do a lot better when they are comfortable, assured and confident they have a roof over their heads and they don't have to worry about being homeless. And so we made changes that are particularly for first home buyers so as to give them a chance to buy an existing home.

If you listen to the member for Gippsland, if you listen to the coalition, they say it's not important enough that we make those changes now, and that what we should do is put it to an election. And here is the seductive element to it: if we were, in some bizarre world, inclined to accept what he has just put to this chamber, it would mean we would basically have a scare campaign from now until the election of overblown claims that don't actually stack up to reality. From their perspective it would mean this change would never happen if we went to that election with them planning all those falsehoods.

They will react, no doubt, to me putting that claim forward, but in the space of just a couple of weeks, boy, have we seen the outrage machine, generated by those opposite, crank up. Some of the claims that are being put forward—even by some in social media, who even admitted that their claims were misleading and weren't tethered to truth—have had tax accountants say they were misleading and not tied to truth. That is what the member for Gippsland wants. That is what the coalition want. They want two years of misleading claims.

We don't want that. We want people to be able to get a roof over their heads. We want to make these changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax so that when a first home buyer, like what I have in my neck of the woods, turns up to an auction they can buy a home. Previously, they would turn up to an auction and face a wall of investors who drive up auction prices for homes in my part of Western Sydney and shut the door on first home buyers who want to buy existing homes. We are saying: 'No, we want better for first home buyers. We want them to get a foot into the door.'

I will be completely honest to the chamber. Yes, I've absolutely had people contact my office opposed to the budget and opposed to the negative gearing and CGT changes. Why? Because of the whole lot of hot air and misinformation that has been put out by, frankly, the coalition or enabled by elements of the Murdoch press that have decided that they will paint, for example, our Treasurer as a massive communist and mislead people on the stuff that is being done. You have to explain that negative gearing can still happen; it's just going to happen differently. By that I mean, if you want to build a nest egg for yourself and you want to negatively gear, what you can do is buy a new home. You can invest in it and build wealth for yourself but also build a new home for the country and, importantly, add to the housing stock. That's the big challenge in this nation. I don't need to tell you this, Deputy Speaker, because you are fully aware of this. We need to build more homes quickly, and we want to be able to do that on top of everything else that we're doing. I've argued for this change. I argued well before the budget that we needed to do this. It is important for us to go through this.

If I may find some sort of agreement with the member for Gippsland, the previous coalition speaker, I will say this: budgets are a reflection of values and we absolutely in this budget demonstrate values—values of fairness for first home buyers who want to get a foot in the door and values of better health care for people by investing in Medicare. I think Medicare is a great reflection of Australian values—that we all chip in to make sure that, when people need help with their health, they are not dependent on their wallet. We all chip in to provide a quality universal healthcare system. If you compare us to the United States, one of the biggest causes of bankruptcy there is medical costs. We don't have that here. We're providing now, under this budget, cheaper medicines. We've made permanent Medicare urgent care clinics, like the one we opened up in Rooty Hill in 2023 that has seen nearly 23,000 people out of hours and given them urgent health care, and all people needed to bring to get that help was their Medicare card. It's a terrific development.

We have also made sure we're providing cost-of-living relief. Again, our values are to help working Australians. We've provided five tax cuts. There's an instant tax deduction that will be provided for working Australians, a tax offset. The tax cuts that we're putting forward will deliver just over $2,800 of tax relief for people. This is hugely important, particularly in my part of Western Sydney.

I'm really happy that we've got a budget that delivers in terms of housing. We'll put in more money to help homes be built on top of everything else that we're doing to try to increase housing stock. What previous coalition speakers have failed to talk about and never really reflected on in their tirades against the changes that we've made to make it easier for first home owners or first homebuyers to get into the market is their own record on building homes. They've opposed everything that we have done and put forward in this massive ambition to build 1.2 million homes by 2030. It is a big target and a hard one to reach but one that is absolutely worth pushing for because, as I said, housing is a human right. We should be able to give people the confidence and assurance of a roof over their head, and we should be pushing and working as hard for that as we can. Our side of politics has those plans. The other side of politics have opposed them and have hidden the fact that, during their time in government—all that time that they were in government from 2013 to 2022—they built the grand total of 380-plus homes in this country. That's not good enough. Then they refused to back in what we're doing.

I think this has been a really important budget, particularly for my part of north-western Sydney. I have argued rather robustly about the need for us to get more money into New South Wales so we can see infrastructure projects such as, for example, the extension of the Sydney Metro from Tallawong to St Mary's. I think that is an important project. There are people spread across five electorates, both Labor and Liberal electorates, that will benefit from that major infrastructure project that needs to happen. I do think that we need to see that. I would also love to see some more infrastructure and, for the long-term good of this country, for the long-term benefit of this nation, for us to find a better way for us to get a stronger return from our natural resources. I'm a firm believer that we should be taxing gas exports and using that money to build a stronger economy into the long term to build resilience and sovereign capability and get us standing on our own two feet. We have been ripped off for too long in terms of our natural resources, and I genuinely, with my full heart, believe that we should absolutely get a better deal on our natural resources. It should make us into an energy superpower and confer on us huge economic and commercial strength. That's going to be a debate that will be ongoing, but I absolutely want to assure people that I stand for that, and I do think it's a debate that will continue.

Earlier, I reflected on some of the debate that we have seen. We have seen some truly off-the-charts behaviour by the coalition—a bit of 'MAGA minor' behaviour too, I might add. We saw one coalition speaker in this chamber call for a revolt, an uprising against the government, and we've seen some other really peculiar rhetoric that's been used, even by coalition frontbenchers who should know better. I sat in that chamber and listened to the Leader of the Opposition effectively write a budget-in-reply off the back of a dog whistle, try and target permanent residents and suggest that they had done something wrong by answering the call to come to this country on skilled visas to fill jobs we couldn't find people for. They're apparently now a bad thing under the coalition.

The coalition is also talking about ramping up resources to drive these permanent residents out of the country. I think that smacks of the Trump approach—what we've seen on American streets with ICE, the driving out of people based on who they are as permanent residents, believing that they're doing the wrong thing and kicking them out of the country. This type of divisive behaviour didn't work well for the former leader of the opposition, and, in a moment of startling logic, it has been decided that the new opposition leader would re-embrace that and use some of that rhetoric in what they're saying.

We've also seen people like Senator Bragg. Senator Bragg has described our budget as a communist tax plan by a communist government. Imagine for a moment if I had decided, based on what I had just described to the chamber about some of the deportation mentality that the coalition are trying to unleash on us, to describe them as fascists. If I had used that type of phrasing, I'd be condemned, no doubt. But they feel free to use that. But not only that—Senator Bragg is a person, by the way, who calls us a communist while also writing a book that wanted to nationalise superannuation and default retirement savings and put them into a government-run investment fund. He calls us communist, but he wants to do that. He's like the Kim Philby double agent of political ideology. On the one hand, he's a mass capitalist; on the next, he's a raving communist in terms of nationalising savings funds.

But on Instagram, back on 17 May, Senator Bragg said, 'Just remember—taxation is legalised theft.' This is a frontbencher of the coalition saying that taxation is legalised theft. He draws his salary from Commonwealth revenue that has been generated by that legalised theft. I don't know if he's going to donate his salary back because he believes that in some way, shape or form these are the proceeds of crime. If he would like to do that, I'd more than welcome him to do that. But this is the kind of out-there mentality that has been used by people like Senator Bragg to try and undermine this budget. He has drawn the support of the same person who ran this campaign that suggested that the government was now going to become an owner in startups, on his post where he said that taxation was legalised theft. This is a coalition frontbencher, mind you, who wants to form a government—unless they are saying that they will no longer tax people at all, which I don't suspect is the case. But this coalition frontbencher got support from someone else who has run a social media campaign that has been shown to be grossly misleading, that they even admitted wasn't the truth and that tax accountants said didn't stack up, and they got the great approval of that person for their statements. This discourse is nonsensical.

If you want to talk about undermining democracy, you can either see what the coalition—the MAGA minor—are saying in terms of calling for revolts, using lines like 'taxation is legalised theft' and describing what's being done as communist. That's what coalition frontbenchers are doing. If this is the standard by which the coalition's opposition leader believes is acceptable, then that is showing us what is undermining democracy in this country. I believe that, regardless of the differences we have, particularly between major parties, we would conduct ourselves responsibly.

We're not expected to agree on everything, but we do have to agree on facts—not the notion of alternative facts, as has been described by some in other arenas in different parts of the world, but that facts matter, that the way you put things forward matter and that, importantly, in a pitch for their own survival, the coalition will not become MAGA minor. They will not try to out One Nation, One Nation, and that they will do the right thing. They may even—if I may end with the words of the late senator Ron Boswell—recognise that, if they preference and support a party like One Nation, they are legitimising them and delegitimising themselves. The coalition deserves to be better, or should be better, than what they are doing, but instead they're into theatrics and overdramatisation.

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