Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to stand up today and comment on this motion. You have to feel a little bit sorry for the Australian Labor Party in these circumstances. Here they are, presented with a budget which has been extremely widely acknowledged and welcomed by the Australian community. The Labor Party’s job as politicians is to identify those people who might not be happy or who might not be considered to be winners with this budget, hunt those people down and advocate on their behalf. It is not a very easy job to do, because there are lots and lots of winners in the community today as a result of what Treasurer Peter Costello announced last night.

The Labor Party have got to push aside people like taxpayers and families who need support and pay taxes. They need to push aside those who are approaching retirement. They need to ignore those who use child care in our community. They need to ignore those who are physically ill. They need to ignore those who are mentally ill. They need to ignore those who drive cars. They need to ignore those who work in the private sector. They need to ignore those who live in rural and regional Australia. They need to plough through all these countless Australians—each of whom can clearly point to a benefit from this budget—and identify those who apparently are not winners this time around. When you look at it from that point of view, you see that it is so totally fatuous as to not be worth wasting the time of the Senate on.

The fact is that this budget is one of a succession of budgets delivered by this government which has looked at the fundamentals of Australian society and has, over the years, put money where it needs to go. We have put money into infrastructure. We have put money into reducing debt. We have put money into supporting the incomes of Australians on low incomes. If you look at the position of those Australians today compared with 10 years ago, you can see that they are infinitely better off as a result of what we have done.

We have lifted real wages. We have provided for stronger community services through better funding and greater support by the states through the GST. We have attended to all the fundamentals of Australian society. If there are individuals for whom no particular benefit can be identified in this budget, that is a short-sighted and narrow-minded approach. The fact is that, no matter what we had done in this budget, we would not have won using that philosophy. If we had not looked at that longstanding problem in Australian society of people on high tax rates paying higher amounts than people in comparable countries in the OECD are paying, we would have criticism from, among others, key figures in the ALP because we had not addressed that problem.

It was only last week, I think, that former Prime Minister Paul Keating criticised this government for not having faced the issue of high marginal tax rates before—and, incidentally, for issues like bracket creep. We had Mr Beazley, not that many years ago, making exactly the same point. We have addressed that in this budget, so where are the plaudits? If we were to spread the benefits of this budget across all income groups at all levels of society, those cuts would necessarily be spread very thin. What would we get then? A milkshake and hamburger type of comment from the opposition such as, ‘You’re spreading your largesse too thinly.’ Of course, if we had made substantial cuts to everybody’s income tax, we would have had more comments, but they would have been along the lines of: ‘You’re spending too much in this area. You’re outlaying far too much. Interest rates are going to go up.’

The fact of the matter is that this mob opposite is looking for any pretext to criticise this budget. We are providing the things that matter to Australians. Every Australian, including those on low incomes that you refer to, will benefit from the outlays on spending that this budget contains such as the extra spending on medical research, on road and rail infrastructure—poor people use roads and trains as well—and on child care. People like that use child-care services. Those things are important and they are provided for in this budget. This budget takes care of the fundamentals of Australia’s economic and social experience, and I am very proud to stand behind it. I think Australians have identified those facts, and they will also stand behind and support this budget when they see the benefits it brings them.