Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to address this matter of public importance, and I think this demonstrates the calcification of the Labor Party beyond all doubt. We've just seen a federal election where the Labor Party's policies were written and authorised by the Labor Party but, of course, were actually drafted by their mates in the unions or the financial sector. I think the Labor Party giving up on an open, competitive economy, their inability to support measures to make our economy more competitive so that more jobs can be created, their inability to support tax cuts, trade deals—whatever—really is depressing. When you think about the record of the Labor Party in the 1980s, where they cut taxes, cut tariffs and opened Australia to the world, what a depressing situation you have today. We have the well-known record of the last Labor government, which left an out-of-control fiscal position for the nation. The Labor Party promised the world but failed to deliver. Their promises, be they health related, education related or disability related, were all unfunded. I'm not saying they weren't good ideas, but the Labor Party left a totally unsustainable budget position for our country.

We are due to deliver the first surplus in over a decade, finally. That will be a $55 billion turnaround from a fiscal year comparison with when we came to office in 2013. The last Labor budget left a $20 billion deficit. So we inherited a deteriorating budget position, which we have stabilised to the point where we can now return to budget balance. The underlying fundamentals of the economy maintain their resilience. I would say, looking at the employment statistics in terms of the gender pay gap and employment growth, that all of those figures are heading in the right direction. Perhaps the most striking statistic of recent times that I can recall is one that was outlined by Senator Cormann at the Sydney Institute just a few weeks ago: if the proportion of people on welfare had remained at the same level it was under Labor in 2013, there would be an additional 350,000 Australians on welfare. That's 350,000 people, in addition to what we have today, that would be on welfare if Labor had remained in office. We have turned that around, and we have turned around the stagnating labour market.

Infrastructure has been a hallmark of our term in office. There is a record investment of over $100 billion over the decade. In my home state, the great state of New South Wales, the government is investing $5.3 billion to deliver the Nancy-Bird Walton international airport in Western Sydney. This recent budget also includes financing the M1 Pacific Motorway extension to Raymond Terrace in New South Wales. And, as I mentioned in my opening comments, we should never forget that Labor failed to deliver any material trade deals during their time in office. Even though they inherited well-advanced trade agreement discussions with Japan and China, they couldn't deliver a trade deal, because their bosses at the unions said they weren't allowed to do trade deals. How depressing!

One of the other reasons that the Labor Party's budget was never credible is that it was built on quicksand. You may recall Wayne Swan, who is now the national president of the Labor Party, presiding over—frankly—a budget crisis, where he said that he was going to deliver four surpluses and failed to deliver any of them. Part of that was because he had decided that he would progress a mining tax, which in 2013-14 was supposed to deliver $2 billion but raised just $126 million in the first six months of that fiscal year. You'd have to say that was a bit of a failure, wouldn't you.

It's not just about tax policy. It's also about being disciplined. Apart from the very strong statistic about welfare—and I do think this is a very important one—we have ground spending growth down to 1.9 per cent, which is the lowest in 50 years. That is an integral part of repairing a busted budget. Of course, 1.9 per cent is vastly lower than the 3.5 per cent we inherited in 2013. So you'd have to say that, in the time we've had in office, we've turned around an unsustainable budget position, which was built on quicksand taxes and totally unreliable projections by the former Treasurer and now national president of the Labor Party, who famously promised four surpluses and delivered four deficits. We won't make the same mistake.

I want to turn to the more recent history—because it's not all about 2013; it's also about 2019. The Labor Party took to the last election almost $400 billion in new taxes to clobber the economy. There were more taxes than you could poke a stick at: the retiree tax, housing tax, trust tax, carbon taxes et cetera. The retiree tax would probably have to be the most unfair tax. I spent many years working in the financial services industry, and many people would come forward and say: 'I've found a way to fix the budget. Here's this great idea where we take all this money from people on a retrospective basis.' The retiree tax would have hit 900,000 Australians—300,000 in New South Wales. It would have pulled the rug out from underneath people who had made their financial arrangements in good faith, thinking that future governments wouldn't come and pull the rug out from underneath them, let alone the Labor Party.

Primarily, many of the people who would have been hit—or could still be hit by the retiree tax, given that Chief Comptroller Swan has said that they should keep the retiree tax; and of course don't keep it a secret—are earning or have a taxable income of less than $37,000. So we are not talking about the cigar-chompers from Collins Street here; we are talking about mums and dads who have been prudent and have invested in Australian shares. Obviously, over the course of history, there have been demutualisations and privatisations, where people have been encouraged to invest in Australian companies. The former Treasurer famously said not only that people should not vote for the Labor Party if they don't like the retiree tax but also that people were 'overinvested in Australian shares'. It's probably quite dangerous territory for people who hold elected office to give unlicensed financial advice—and it is certainly not something that I propose to do.

The retiree tax is still a key part of the Labor Party's policies, despite it being terribly unfair and retrospective. But of course there's also the housing tax. This has to be the stupidest of all the taxes Labor has come up with. Basically, the premise is that if we put more taxes on housing that will create more houses—amazing! This is from the Labor Party, who championed deregulating the economy and opening our country to the world—to their eternal credit and the eternal credit of Bob Hawke—and now they're saying that more tax equals more houses. It's just crazy. Independent analysts have looked at the housing tax concept. I guess that is what you could call it, though it's probably more accurately described as a fiasco. In Sydney, SQM Research said that property prices would have fallen but also, because there would be fewer houses, rents would have risen by 10 per cent in Sydney alone by 2021 if Labor had won the election and the housing tax had been enacted. So it is a complete boondoggle. It really is quite embarrassing.

Those two taxes alone make up a large part of the $400 billion hit to the economy that the Labor Party would like to foist upon the Australian people. We are very happy to have an economic debate any time that Labor want to have one. Unfortunately, they are unable to draft their own policies and they are relying upon people at the ACTU and in the financial sector to draft their policies, which is very sad. There seems to be no sign of a revision coming, given that Chief Comptroller Swan has said that he wants to keep all their tax policies in place. We have been able to repair the budget so that we can guarantee essential services to Australians who rely upon those services, and we've done that without increasing taxes. Labor's policy, unfortunately, is clear: the taxes stay. I'm sure, in time, they will come to their senses and realise that it's totally unsustainable and ill-advised.