Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Bonner has just updated the House, in terms of her time spent with small businesses across her electorate, and I commend her for doing that. Someone else in this place has been really busy with respect to small businesses too. He's been popping up in my feed—not once daily, but continuously. The Prime Minister seems to have visited almost every startup operating in Australia. I see him at plumbing businesses, at cafes and at tech startups; he has been a busy man. And he takes a selfie on every occasion—at least, that's what I used to think, but then my friends told me this was AI generated spoof, which I thought was funny.

In any event, I couldn't help but accept the invitation that the member for Bonner offered me at the end of that contribution, when she was talking about her time with small businesses. I can talk a little more about why it is that small businesses around the country are taking to social media to congratulate the Prime Minister for becoming part-owner, part-shareholder and part-director of their businesses; that's for later.

Overwhelmingly, Australians think our nation is headed in the wrong direction. I don't think anyone could argue with that. Now, it is the case that very many of them are struggling, and I see and feel that every day in my electorate. Imagine you are doing it tough, struggling to make ends meet, making the choice between heating or eating. You sit down on budget night, turn on the television and listen in to what the Treasurer has to offer—a budget that confirms record spending, the highest taxes a government has ever levied on the Australian people, a series of broken promises. But then comes the end of the speech.

Australians in their lounge rooms watching this coverage saw an Australian Labor Party stand up and cheer. Now, I've got to tell you, more than one of my constituents has spoken to me about how that really got under their goat. In fact, I've had people say to me, 'Tony, I'm a constituent of yours. I've never voted for you. I probably never will because I'm a rusted-on Labor voter, but it really stuck in my craw to watch the political class, the governing class of this country, cheer—cheer higher taxes, more spending, broken promises.' And that's why, when we read today Labor were expecting the fallout for this budget, I call BS. In any event, I'll speak to more of that in a minute.

I want to take this speech to the things that perhaps my electorate were desperate to see in the budget, but sadly didn't. Madam Deputy Speaker Payne, we share a constituency that includes wine grape producers. You would know, as I do, the industry is doing it tough. That is perhaps the understatement of the day in this building. I think the industry has done it tough for a very long time but is now at the point of catastrophe. What was needed was real support that could help structural reform for the wine industry, whether those are my producers in the Riverland, the Barossa, the Limestone Coast or, indeed, Deputy Speaker, yours in the Hunter. For years we have warned this government, the Australian Labor Party, or at least I have, that there was need for support. Peak industry body Australian Grape and Wine have been doing the same. We need targeted structural reform to assist this industry.

Global demand for wine is in significant decline. The industry is in structural oversupply. There was nothing in this budget to support struggling wine grape producers. But almost as if to kind of grab the knife and twist it, or to provide a kick in the guts on budget night, we read in the detail that the government has decided to phase out the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door Grant program. I don't know what message Australian wine grape producers can receive out of that other than the Australian government just doesn't care. You're producing red wine grapes at about $80 a tonne. You're getting paid about $80 a tonne but you've spent nearly $100 just to harvest them—no care, no support; in fact, the very modest offering of the Wine Tourism and Cellar Door Grant program is gone.

I'm also grateful for the member for Sturt, who's in the chamber. She, like me, would love to see heavy vehicles out of the suburbs of Adelaide. Adelaide now remains the last capital city in the country to have a major freight route through the middle of it. In my electorate, producers—primary producers principally—and indeed contractors who move goods drag their freight all the way up to the top of the Adelaide Hills. Under great stress they come down at a controlled speed, only to arrive and to be blessed by the suburbs of Adelaide. They're driving 60-tonne B-doubles along causeways that include many schools. They're traversing the electorates of the member for Sturt and others on the way to Port Adelaide. We have got to get those trucks out of those suburbs.

The way to do that is to build the Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass. We can take trucks off at Monarto; we can send them along Sedan to Cambrai to bypass those towns. We can duplicate the Swanport Bridge. We can build the Truro bypass. I shouldn't get distracted, but I have been. The Truro bypass—that project that was ready to go, shovels in the ground, before the minister for infrastructure ordered a review. That review cancelled that project, crushing the work that had been done to get the project not just shovel ready but to have equipment there and ready to go. In any event, we have to build a bypass. There is nothing in this budget for that.

I was also surprised because when this side of the House were in government and when there were offerings in our budgets for transport infrastructure, we would hear criticism coming from SA Labor. I have heard nothing. I have heard no criticisms about—well, there have been criticisms on the front page of the Advertiser. There has been plenty of criticism, but we haven't seen the Premier or the Treasurer of South Australia stand up and call this out—perhaps because we won't have a South Australian election for a number of years hence. But the truth is we're not going to see the Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass in this term of government. In fact, my prediction is we won't see it for a very long time, and certainly not the aspects of it that were ready to go. This budget confirms that.

Those opposite like to champion what is in the budget for health. I've been championing a headspace for the community of the Barossa for a very long time. I was hoping it might find its way into the budget, but nothing for a headspace in Barossa.

Perhaps, Madam Deputy Speaker Swanson, your electorate office, like mine, receives any number of complaints about mobile phone reception. In fact, it remains the No. 1 issue that constituents raise with my office. This budget cut $21.4 million from regional communications funding. The budget axed the Better Connectivity Plan for Regional and Rural Australia, including future rounds of the Mobile Black Spot Program, the Regional Connectivity Program, the On Farm Connectivity Program, disaster and communication resilience measures, the regional tech hubs and the National Audit of Mobile Coverage. Labor is treating regional Australians like second-class—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:48 to 12:00

Before we were rudely interrupted by the bells, I was bemoaning the silence that has emanated from the South Australian Labor government regarding the disappointment for South Australians with respect to this budget, particularly around infrastructure spending, which is something they've been quite muscular about in the past, particularly when there were coalition governments, but now there is silence. That does stand in contrast to criticisms that have been levelled at this budget by other Labor premiers, such as Premier Minns and his government in New South Wales and Premier Cook from your own state of Western Australia, Deputy Speaker Lawrence, but unfortunately in South Australia we have a Labor government that understands who their overlords are.

In any event, in the time I have remaining, I just want to talk about an alternative plan—the alternative plan—set out by the Leader of the Opposition on the Thursday following the budget in the budget-in-reply, the centrepiece of which of course is the tax-back guarantee. There's an infinite tax revenue glitch, if you like, here in Canberra. It's called bracket creep. Very few people perhaps fully understand it, and they certainly don't understand the scope of what it does. But, effectively, as inflation rages, wages try to keep pace with prices. People receive wage increases, but of course that puts them into higher and higher and higher tax brackets. Governments love bracket creep because it's the silent killer in the night. It's the silent hand that fills up government coffers. Well, we've said we'll end bracket creep. We will index income tax thresholds to inflation because that is the fair and appropriate thing to do, not these one-off handouts in terms of the working Australian tax offset. That's not the fair way of doing it. The fair way of doing it is to index income tax thresholds.

We've also indicated that we'll cap migration based on how many homes Australians build. It makes sense. You can only invite as many people to your country as you can appropriately house. On budget-in-reply night, we also squared it with the Australian people that—surprisingly to many, particularly in my electorate; there was an amazing amount of feedback about this—there are no less than 17 welfare payments that are made available to noncitizens in this country. To be clear and to avoid the scare campaign that is obviously emanating from places in this building, every single individual who is currently in the country will be grandfathered, but what we're messaging is that, if you want to come to Australia, then we as Australians will commit to you once you commit to us in the form of becoming citizens.

I think the element of this budget-in-reply speech which is perhaps not referred to enough is the future generations fund. I talked earlier about the revenue glitch that happens in this place in terms of bracket creep. There's another one. Treasury officials, reasonably and appropriately, take a very conservative approach when they're setting commodity prices in the budget. We wouldn't like to overestimate those things and be underwhelmed at the end of the financial year. But what happens, consistently, is that we realise commodity prices are much higher than those forecast in the budget papers. That revenue comes in, of course, in the form of higher company tax receipts.

Instead of squirrelling that money away to pay down debt or to build productive infrastructure—which are the two things that we will do with those windfall gains—those opposite have consistently spent all of those windfalls in the year in which they've been received. That's not how you build a nation. That's not how you pay down debt. That's how you end up with a budget which represents the highest spend and tax budget this nation has ever seen. At a time when Australians are doing it tough, those opposite celebrated on budget night—celebrated a budget of broken promises; a budget of higher taxes, with more spending and less to see for it.

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