Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution in relation to the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2025-2026, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2025-2026 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2025-2026. The main point to make is that the nation's finances are no longer within the control of the government. We are now looking at a situation of an almost $40 billion deficit this year and a well over $100 billion deficit over the forward estimates. The reality is that public finances in Australia are completely broken. They're completely broken because the government has decided that it wants to spend at beyond pandemic levels on an ongoing basis—at 27 per cent of GDP—and, as a result, it has needed to find new tax revenues.

The other point to make is that the government has completely debased the integrity of public finances with its commitment to significant off-budget funding. When you look at the overall position of the Commonwealth government, we can talk about the deficit, we can talk about the structural deficit, we can talk about the spending and we can talk about the overreliance on a small number—a shrinking number—of Australians for the tax base. But I think one of the biggest problems is this issue of integrity. This government has sought to provide all sorts of different boondoggle funds, like the Future Made in Australia fund, the housing fund, the rewiring fund and the reconstruction fund—I'm still not sure what we're reconstructing from—but all of these funds are off budget. None of them come into the main picture when the Treasurer hands down the budget.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when, at one level, you look at the budget deficit and you think, that's a pretty bad position—$40 billion this year, $100 billion over the forwards, at least, and we're approaching $1 trillion in debt. The budget itself, even in the way the government presents it, is extremely sick. But then, when you build all of the off-budget items into the picture, you realise that it is actually beyond sick and that we are never going to recover our position unless we are able to significantly rebalance the budget.

I think it's reasonable to say that the Australian people are, rightly, frustrated with politicians. I think they're frustrated with the fact that the offerings they get at elections look more like bribes than proper stewardship of an economy. If you go back in time, I think it's reasonable to say that the Liberal Party in the early nineties, with its Fightback! program, was at that time very committed to putting together a program that was going to address some of these underlying structural problems. The question is: what is leadership of today going to do—the leadership of all parties—to arrest the decline the nation is in?

You can measure the decline that we're in by virtue of looking at the absolutely busted budget. You can look at the way the Australian people are struggling because the government has failed on the supply side in relation to energy and in relation to housing. The fact that Mr Chalmers says he's read this book called Abundanceit can't be true, because if he'd read the book Abundance he would've discovered that supply-side reforms are necessary in this country if we're going to unleash the energy abundance that we need and the housing abundance that we need. We need to see a position where we get more of everything. We need to see more housing and more energy—all forms of energy—because we need to have more stuff.

I think the Australian people are rightly frustrated. They look at the position that we are in as a nation, and they say: 'Well, I can't get a house. I can't get fuel in the car. The federal budget is stuffed and will never be fixed. I've got to pay higher taxes. Maybe I'll have to pay more taxes if Mr Chalmers—or Dr Chalmers or whatever he calls himself—wants to fiddle around with the tax settings.' I think that they're rightly frustrated. I understand that that leads to people thinking, 'The political system is broken, and so we're going to try and do something to shake it up because we can't get even basic stuff right.'

I think the fact that a person on an average income really has no realistic prospect of being able to buy a house in some of the capital cities is hugely disappointing, frustrating and upsetting. People will feel anger about that. You've done the right thing. You've trained yourself as a tradesperson, or you've been to university. You've worked and you've saved, and you still can't make that happen. Then, beyond that, there's this current fuel crisis. I think this has completely exposed the frailties of the nation and the fact that we are so reliant here, at the bottom end of the supply chain, in the South Pacific, with an abundance of resources we haven't bothered to dig out or suck out of the ground. These are some of the reasons why people quite reasonably say, 'Why are we paying you people to go to Canberra and argue with one another and sometimes with yourselves?' I think that's a reasonable question.

So the job for all of us in a debate on an appropriation bill around the quality of public finances is to reflect on that and to think, 'Are we doing everything we can to put forward the most ambitious program that we can muster?' And I think the answer is, invariably, no. I think the answer has been no. The government, although it has some well-meaning, nice people in it, effectively runs on the basis that the people that they're close to—the unions and the super funds and all the other people that they're mates with—write their policies for them and they say, 'This is a good idea; we'll do that.' But there's no broader vision about what they can do for the country. There doesn't appear to be any ambition.

Dr Chalmers has been the Treasurer for four years. He gave a speech last week and said he'd done tax reform. This was one of the funniest speeches I'd ever heard. His idea of tax reform is bringing back bracket creep, increasing taxes on small business, fiddling around with Future Made in Australia, which is a boondoggle, and increasing the tax compliance burden. What tax reform has Jim Chalmers, the Treasurer, done? What has he done? I'm none the wiser. I don't think anyone knows. Certainly he has said that he likes Paul Keating. I think Paul Keating did a lot of good things for this country. I think he was very brave and had ambition for this country. If Mr Chalmers wants to model himself on Mr Keating, he needs to study that former treasurer, who did some actual reform. He did some actual things. Yes, he was good at politics. I worry that, when he read Paul Keating's memoir, all he learnt was how to do the political spin. That's what I think happened. He read Paul Keating's memoir, and all he was able to retain was the political spin, not the economic reform. That is ultimately what the country is going to need if we are going to recover this position.

In the spirit of a contribution to the appropriation bill debate, of course, the appropriation bills are the government's expenditure. There's no question that at 27 per cent of GDP, when we're already living in a country which has got a high tax burden on people in particular, the government is spending too much. So the question for all the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives over the next couple of years as we get closer to the election is, 'Are members of the parliament going to be honest with the Australian people about the sustainability of public finances?' because, after four years of Labor, the budget trajectory is never going to recover. They have broken the budget. Public finances in Australia are stuffed, and that's why the high taxes have to be considered in the budget.

The only way to get the country back to work on a sustainable basis is to also look at spending. I get that politicians are very scared about the idea that people won't vote for them if they say they're going to cut something, but this is lowest-common-denominator stuff—the fact that we don't have more means testing and that, in relation to programs that are available in Australia, we don't consider restricting them to Australian citizens. I think there are a lot of things that we can do to rein in spending, and I commend anyone who is prepared to make a serious policy contribution even if I don't agree with that, because I think that's the job of being a parliamentarian and a policymaker. I commend the member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, for at least doing something. She has done a terrible tax policy, but at least it is a tax policy, and it's more of a tax policy than the government has done in four years.

We are living in a time of low ambition for our country, and you can see it in the budget trajectory, which is completely cactus, and in the quality of the tax debate. I mean, fair dinkum! You have people in this place who say, 'Well, we can fix the housing crisis with more taxes and we can fix the energy crisis with more taxes.' It's absolutely insane. People who are members of the Labor government who say they've read the book Abundance are lying, because that is against the grain of the supply-side theory that is expounded by Klein and Thompson in their book.

Ultimately, it comes down to a pretty simple equation. How are we going to reduce the amount of public spending below 27 per cent of GDP? How are we going to have that honest conversation about how the country has its backside out of its pants and cannot afford to spend at this level on an ongoing basis? We cannot continue to run on the basis that our budget deficit will exceed $1 trillion. It will be $1 trillion very soon, and Dr Evil will not be here to save us. We'll have to bail our way out of this in some way. It is a tax on future generations. The younger people of today—those people who are under 40—should take notice. When we tick over to $1 trillion of debt this year under Labor, they should take notice. The younger people of Australia should be very aware. They should switch on and keep a close eye on this, because, when we tick over to $1 trillion of debt this year, that will be a tax on them. They will be paying higher taxes in the future unless we restrain spending and get back on track today. It's that simple.

You also have to look at the broader question about the tax system very seriously, because the burden on people who are working is absolutely unbearable. The idea that the working person in Australia has to pay such a high degree of their ordinary salary and wages off to the taxman is absolutely soul destroying, and it cannot be sustained. It is a hard country to do business in and a hard country to be a worker in, unless we get serious about these facts around the sustainability of public spending, the broken tax system and the necessity of supply-side reform. If you want to fiddle around with the tax system, fine, but you have to do it on a basis of actually reducing the heaviest burdens on people and companies. We've got to be realistic. We are living in a market—in a world—where there is competition for capital. If people can mine things in other jurisdictions at a lower tax rate, they will, and that's where those jobs will go. If a company can build houses and make money out of it in another jurisdiction, they will. These are the facts. We cannot pretend that we're living in some socialist utopia where we can continue to tax the backside out of the country and effectively run programs which are unsustainable and unaffordable.

These are the questions for Australian people to ask their parliamentarians: What ambition do they have for our country? Where do they see fixing public finances on the list of the priorities? Surely, we can do a better job than running a $40 billion deficit, $100 billion over the forwards and a never, never, never return to surplus which is only going to result in higher taxes on future generations.