QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS – Answers to Questions

It was seven weeks ago, to the day, that the Labor Party and Jim Chalmers delivered a budget. Their budget was based on the premise that inflation would be less than three per cent by Christmas. That’s the promise they gave to the Australian people. In seven weeks, the entire premise of the government’s budget has effectively been blown out of the water; it’s past its use-by date. This year’s budget has lasted about the same amount of time as a bottle of two-litre milk on the shelf; it’s now stale and out of date. It’s clearly not fit for purpose for the economic conditions that we face right now. The government were delivering a budget banking on inflation trending down. That’s the advice they say they got from the Treasury. The government were shocked by the inflation figures that came out a couple of weeks ago. The whole premise of the budget—the state of the spending in our budget—has been proven to be totally wrong and not appropriate for the massive economic battle that every Australian family is facing right now. All Australian families are on the front line, struggling to put their budgets together. It’s tough to plan what they can spend and
what they can scrimp on to make sure ends meet. They have to make changes. Sometimes they have to make changes every month, when interest rates go up and when the electricity bill is higher than expected. Then there are the grocery bills. It’s amazing these days when you go to the shops and you look at your trolley and you look back at the register and have no idea how it is costing that much. But it is, so people have to make changes. I think now the government really has to make changes. They have made the decisions on a $500 billion budget. It’s a much bigger budget than that of the average mum and dad. They are spending $500-odd billion a year of your money, and they got it wrong. They should now adjust that budget. They should issue a new budget. They shouldn’t go home for six weeks. We’re about to go on a break from parliament, but they shouldn’t go on holiday. The government need to work harder now because they got it so wrong and they need to redesign the entire budget. It is only making things worse for the Australian people. Seven weeks ago, the government made big hay of the fact that they were going to give us all $300 of your money. That’s $300 they raised by taxing you and they’ll give it back to you over the year through electricity rebates. They wanted a big pat on the back for giving people some of their own money back. To put this $300 in context, if interest rates go up in August, as the market now expects, if the Reserve Bank lift interest rates in about a month’s time, then the average Australian mortgagee will be facing an increase in their repayments of $1,000 a year. The government made big hay of giving people this $300, but, if the interest rates go up 25 basis points—they’ve gone
up 12 times in the life of this government and they may go up another tick—there’s $1,000 again the same families will have to find. That $300 rebate won’t mean that much at all. The reason for that increase, if interest rates do go up, the government has to take responsibility for. It’s because they have let spending get out of control. They keep saying they deliver surpluses. But the surpluses are because of the mining sector and the massive boom we’ve had there. It’s nothing to do with them. You can go to a table in the budget. On about page 90 of every budget there’s a table which outlines what the government has done—what effect the government’s decisions have had on the budget. In this year’s budget, they increased spending. Their decisions increased spending by more than $20 billion. Last year it was exactly the same—more than $20 billion. Those two budgets together, the first two full Labor government budgets, have been the biggest spending budgets on this metric, outside of COVID, since the days of Kevin Rudd and the global financial crisis. That’s the decision they made. They pumped in an extra $40 billion through our nation’s economy while it was overheating. At least Kevin Rudd had the excuse of the global financial crisis. Spending some money made some sense. He went too far and for too long, but it was in the right direction. This is the complete opposite direction. We’ve been saying for over a year now, since their budget last year, that they were adding fuel to inflation fire. Now those fires are raging out of control in this country in a way that no other developed country is having to experience. As my friend Senator Sharma said earlier, in Europe and North America their inflation rates are much
lower than ours and trending down. We’re going in the opposite direction because of this government. I would say the government really needs to not have a break. It needs to keep working—and a bit harder, because Australians are having to work very hard to pay for the economic mistakes of this government.