Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can only thank the senator for his commentary about cartoons in newspapers. It shows how much the Labor Party have got to attack in the wonderful budget.

Madam Deputy President, tomorrow night you're going to be subjected to what will be called an alternative budget by the alternative government. It will be full of lies, mistruths and misconstructions. Let me just warn anyone who might be listening to Mr Shorten tomorrow night about Labor's record on what they promise and what they do. Remember 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'? A Labor leader said that and was elected, and the first bit of legislation that came in was a carbon tax. Mr Swan, for the six years that I heard him deliver budgets in this house, each year promised that the next year there would be a surplus of the budget, and not once was there a surplus. In fact, in most years the deficit went up.

If you want to know what Labor promises, just go back to the 1993 election, when Labor promised tax cuts. In fact, they did more than promise tax cuts; they actually passed laws. They were called the l-a-w law tax cuts. They were legislated. Labor did that because they thought they were going to lose the 1993 election. As it turned out, miraculously, they won that election. You know the first thing they did when they came back into office? They reneged on them. They cancelled those l-a-w law tax cuts. So, whatever you hear Mr Shorten say tomorrow night, just know that it won't be truthful; it'll be misconstrued. Don't take my word for it—go back and look at the record of Labor's budget malfeasance.

There are a couple of things that need to be raised. The first is that Senator Pratt kept talking about penalty rates being dropped by this government. A lot of Labor senators keep talking about that. It is a complete, abject, outright lie. They know that penalty rate decisions are made by the Fair Work Commission. And who set up the Fair Work Commission? The Labor Party in government. Who appointed most of the judges to the Fair Work Commission? The Labor Party—yet they continue the lie that it's the government that has cut penalty rates. The second is that Labor simply can't be trusted with money.

This is a wonderful budget. Every low- to middle-income earner will get $1,000 more in their pay packet once the government's laws are brought in. For a dual-income family, that's $2,160 to help low-income earners and middle-income earners, to support consumption growth and ease the cost of living As my colleague Senator Paterson has explained, there are tax cuts for all, going into the future, and there are tax cuts immediately for small business, the engine room of Australia's economy. There is the instant tax write-off increase from $25,000 to $30,000—and it seems, if I'm reading the budget right, that that now becomes a permanent feature for small business.

And why can we give these concessions to small business? Why can we make these concessions to low- and middle-income earners? Why can we have record spending on education? Why can we have record spending on health, with more drugs, more expensive drugs, put on the PBS? Why can we substantially increase infrastructure expenditure to $100 billion over the next 10 years? Why can we do all this? It's because we managed the economy carefully. We've got the budget back into the black. We've got the budget in such a way that, in the forward years, there will be more surpluses, and we'll be able to build more hospitals, more schools and more roads. That's what you can do when you carefully manage finances and carefully manage government expenditure. Labor, on the other hand, will spend like crazy. We know that. Everybody knows that. They will buy votes with it, but someone always has to pay, and we've seen the results of that. We've seen the job that our government have had to do to get the budget back into the black and keep it that way. We need to do that because we need that money to spend on essential services. (Time expired)