Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

Toto, I've got a feeling we aren't in Australia anymore! Just like Dorothy standing in a strange land, Australians are looking around and asking, 'How did we get here?' because this does not feel like the Australia we were promised. Somewhere along the yellow brick road, the Wizard of Oz has lost his plot.

For generations, Australia was a place where aspiration was not something to apologise for. But the Albanese government wizard stands grinning behind the curtain right now, hands yanking rusted levers labelled 'higher taxes', 'bracket creep', 'CGT', 'negative gearing' and 'red tape'. Smoke pours through the room, while ordinary Australians—the tradies, the nurses, the small-business owners and the families—stand watching the Australian dream crumble, brick by brick.

There was a time when a tradie could follow his own yellow brick road. It started in a battered ute, with 300,000 kilometres on the clock, a toolbox rattling in the trailer and a thermos of bad coffee riding shotgun, before the sun rose. They built futures for their families and helped build the economic backbone of this country—because tradies do not just build homes, roads and skylines; they build Australia itself. In 2023-24 alone, the construction industry accounted for seven per cent of Australia's GDP and employed around 1.3 million people. These are the men and women who physically built modern Australia: a plumbing company; a roofing crew; one apprentice became two, and two became 10; the ute became a fleet; the rented workshop became a warehouse with a family name on the front. That was the Australian dream—the emerald city.

But, right now, too many Australians feel like characters trapped in The Wizard of Oz. There are the scarecrow Australians, treated like they're too foolish to notice what's happening to their pay packets, to their businesses and to their futures. They're told anyone with an investment property is some kind of wealthy property baron gaming the system, when, for many Australians, property is their single-biggest financial asset. Most investors are on modest incomes. Seventy-one per cent own just one investment property and 19 per cent own just two.

Then there are our tin man Australians, exhausted by a system that no longer seems to have a heart. They're small-business owners lying awake at night wondering how they will cover wages, insurances, power bills and rising costs.

Then there are our lions. They are Australians not lacking courage, but fearful in Albanese's Australia, where every shift worked, every risk taken and every sacrifice made is just slugged with more taxes—on housing, on savings, on investment and on small businesses—because the wizard can't manage money. He's coming after yours, while one in three households wonder not what they'll eat tonight but whether they can eat at all.

Every new tax, every change to investment rules, every attack on small business and family assets sends the same message to working Australians, including to our working poor: how dare you try to build something of your own! The people being hit are not billionaires in penthouses; they are sparkies with busted knees, concrete workers with shoulders held together by painkillers, and families who missed holidays and weekends because they believed sacrifice today would mean security tomorrow.

The Albanese government's changes to capital gains tax put at risk a longstanding Australian tradition of working hard to build something of your own and pass it on to the next generation—a tradition that has long defined families, tradies and small businesses across this great land, especially in mortgage belt communities like Lindsay, where we have nearly 21,000 GST-registered businesses, and they power our Penrith economy. We have 5,000 construction businesses and over 860 manufacturers. Together, they support nearly one in four City of Penrith jobs. Lindsay is the canary in the coalmine of the Australian economy. It is the pulse of aspiration in this country. The canary knows before anyone else, and right now Lindsay is twitching.

The Real Estate Institute of Australia doesn't agree with these taxes, nor does the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The list goes on, and the Australian people are really clicking their heels together right now, dreaming of a better land. They're dreaming of home, because there's no place like home, and this is not the country Australians have worked so hard to build.

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