Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment and Water (Senate)) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of questions from Senators McAllister, Brown, Ciccone and Cameron.

As all of the answers to questions in question time today from this government highlight, what we have before us in this budget is a fake budget, full of fake promises. If you drill down into the answers to every one of the questions asked by the opposition today, you can drive an absolute truck through all of the premises inside the answers to any one of those questions.

We have heard here, in the answers to questions from Senator McAllister to Minister Fifield, that they have treated Australians on low incomes as a complete afterthought in this budget. Less than 24 hours after this budget was delivered we see a backflip for forgotten Australians who weren't included in the $75 payment—those on Austudy, ABSTUDY, double orphan pensions, Newstart allowance and parenting payments. Why didn't you think of these people before?

Let's move to the other people affected by this budget. Look at the 'fairness' of the tax cuts contained in this budget, which are inherently biased against those on low incomes. Those earning under $40,000 will get a puny, tiny tax cut compared with those at the top end of town. If you take someone who is a student on Austudy, they were going to miss out on their energy supplement; it has now been rectified. Those on low incomes are absolutely not getting their fair share of the tax cuts in this budget. Instead, if you look at the forecasts for these tax cuts, it is an absolute bonanza for the high-income earners in our nation—an absolute bonanza! If you look at the wage index of our nation, as Senator Cameron asked of Senator Cash, and if you look at the false declarations of wages growth in this country that this government has forecast, not once has this government met forecast wages growth predictions. I think it was 3.5 per cent in the 2017-18 budget by 2020. In the following year, it was pushed out to 2021. And now we are seeing wages growth being pushed out another year.

What if the assumptions that the government had put forward about wages growth in our country had been correct? According to the papers that the government has put forward, wages in this country should have grown by some seven per cent—that is despite the fact that the government does things like attack penalty rates. What kind of thing is it to expect that you can deliver wages growth in our nation while, at the same time, cutting penalty rates? It simply doesn't stack up. You do nothing as a government to stimulate wages growth, because your industrial relations settings—and Senator Cormann said it himself—are pretty much designed to keep wages low in our country.

So, as we head into this election, which I hope will be called on the weekend, we have laid out before us, plain and clear, a fake budget full of fake policies. The fundamentals in this budget simply do not add up. There is the NDIS saving that should have been spent and the slow progress of this Commonwealth government in dealing with the states. There are the attacks on penalty rates and the lack of wage rises. Assumption after assumption— (Time expired)