Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2026-2027, Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027

Mr JOYCE (New England) (12:24): I don't quite know where to start on the paucity of this budget. As an accountant, I was always fascinated by two groups of people amongst the three. The one in the middle you didn't really worry too much about.

They never really went that far ahead and never really went that far behind. The ones at the bottom I was always very interested in. They went broke, and I was always working out how they did it.

They had some remarkable similarities. The ones at the top made a lot of money. Here's a trick: if you want to get ahead in life, you buy and sell capital assets.

You buy shares. You buy a house. You can go out and buy yourself a block of gold if you want.

But you buy and sell capital assets, and ultimately you will become wealthy if that's what you want to be. If you want to be poor then it's quite simple. You buy chattels, which are dispensable, depreciating assets, or you buy straight-out expenses: a trip overseas, a new stereo, cars, boats, bikes—all that type of stuff.

And you will be poor. That's very simple. Now, the people who buy capital assets do it by not spending their money on chattels.

They've paid their tax. And then, rather than go on a new trip to Sapporo to go skiing or to Port Macquarie for the weekend, they put their money away and they buy shares or they buy a deposit on a house. This budget says to those who are prudent, 'We are going to punch you.' It says to those who are spendthrift, 'We will reward you.' It shows is no understanding whatsoever of basic business principles.

This is a budget, to be frank, that is driven by one thing: the government's run out of money and they're desperately trying to find it. And they're moralising about how they get it. Here's another fundamental thing about economics.

You have your balance sheet of your assets and your liabilities, and you have your P&L, your revenues and your expenses. What we've been seeing is a whole range of expenses making their way to the P&L—cost-of-living measures, this measure, that measure. And they always come out as talking points from the Labor Party.

Whenever you're in the media, out come the talking points. These are all things done for you as if they actually came out of the Labor Party's own personal pocket. They didn't.

They came from the taxpayer. They got to a point where they went gone, 'Hang on; we can't pay for this.' Rather than make the assets on the balance sheet work better, they go back to the P&L looking for revenues, and revenues on the government. P&L are called taxes.

So they increased their taxes to cover the trinkets that they handed out. To be honest, they should have told people when they were handing the money out that they were going to have to get it back. A business makes the assets on the balance sheet work better to earn more revenue in such a form that the assets create the revenue and therefore pay the taxes, which go across to P&L.

So what are the assets on the balance sheet? There are two major ones. There are the actual seed assets, which governments do have a role in.

They are ports, railway lines, freight railway lines, approvals for mines, streamlining things so that they can get going, dams—dams are a great seed asset. Have a look around. Where there are dams, there's wealth.

You can't miss it. The other great asset on the balance sheet is the entrepreneurship of small-business people. Small-business people, by the very nature of their being in business, take risk.

It's not like a salary or wage earner. They have paid tax on money. Then they invested in a business which they may lose their shirt on.

They may lose money, and therefore we are always mindful of that, because we need these entrepreneurial people to work our nation's assets on the balance sheet. What this budget does is to say: 'We're going to punish you for being entrepreneurial.' It's saying: 'If you lose your shirt'—and remember that we've had record insolvencies in small business, says ASIC, in the last 12 months, and an increase in insolvencies of over 34 per cent—'we're not going to give you anything back; if you go broke, hard luck for you.

But, if you win, we're going to take 47 per cent—45 per cent plus a two per cent Medicare levy. We're going to take 45 per cent and a minimum of 30 per cent off you.' This just tells people: 'Why bother?' They'll think: 'It'd be better if I just whooped it up and had a jolly good time. That would make more sense.

I've always wanted to go skiing in Sapporo. Why not go?' In this budget, I couldn't see anything to show that they're going to build a dam. There was a freight rail called the Inland Rail—and they just made up this fantastic figure, and they got rid of that.

They are going to invest in high-speed rail from Sydney to Newcastle. Now here's the trick: that probably will cover about 30 per cent of its running costs from the tickets, even if we ever build it, and will cost well in excess of $100 billion—well in excess. And so you won't build the Inland Rail, which is freight rail, which actually pays for itself, but you will build a fast rail, with an 80 kilometre tunnel, and you've put money towards it.

An example of how passenger rail just never washes its face—but it eats its head off—is the one in Melbourne called the Suburban Rail Loop. It's going broke before it even starts. So they're tipping more money into it—because that's what you do: if something's not working, obviously, you go and just put even more money into something that doesn't work!

So they can find money for another passenger rail, but they can't find money for the freight rail. What we've also seen is this statement, which is wrong, that this budget is somehow going to help people who rent. People rent because they can't buy.

People don't rent houses because there was an option that they could buy, but they decided not to, so they decided to rent. Generally, overwhelmingly, people are in the rental market because they cannot afford a house. As such, they are a static block in the market.

And that static block can be moved up, so there are more in houses, or down, so you're squeezing people at the bottom out to live in their cars. What you've done, immediately, with those people can be seen no more clearly than in the clearance rate for houses in the member for Cook's great city on the weekend. It was around 80 per cent; it's down to about 54 per cent— An opposition member interjecting— Mr JOYCE: or down to 40!

What that means is: it wasn't that a whole heap of first home buyers turned up and—lo and behold!—all got themselves into houses. People just decided not to buy them, and they were just removed from the market. So what you are seeing now is not a more fluid rental market where people are coming in.

You're seeing the poor getting pushed out. And you'll pick them up in their cars—that's where they're off to. That's what you've done.

And the reason you've done it—and, sorry, I hate to be trite—is that so few of you have ever been in business, and you just don't get the fundamentals of how businesses work. Paul Keating actually had a crack at this. You should have read your history books, at the very least.

We've got a Treasurer who did a PhD on Paul Keating and didn't realise that he'd had a crack at this and it turned into a disaster. After two years, they had to reverse it. Why?

Because they were just putting people out into the streets. And it has already started. It's amazing how quickly those in the market react.

They reacted within weeks of your budget. They've already reacted. What you'll see now is just going to be a more inflexible, static market that renters can't get into.

Remember: the only reason you have an investment house is so you can put a rental tenant in it; otherwise, you can't claim it—you can't claim a house that you're not getting rental income from. Well, for a period of time you can, but, ultimately, it has to be an asset that is earning money, so you can claim your expenses against it, and, therefore, to claim the interest, you have to have the rent, and to have the rent, you've got to have a tenant—a rental tenant.

In looking for that rental tenant, at times the market will drive the rents down so you can get that rental tenant in. This completely and utterly turns the whole logic on its head, because now—seeing I can't negatively gear it—the only way I can get my return is to put up rents. And, if I can put up rents, I don't care about the negative gearing; I've made my money.

See if I'm wrong. Let's come back here. But the trouble is, to be proven right means that we've proven that we can really, really hurt people, and the people you will hurt are the poorest.

Now let's go back to another issue. Out in regional areas, where I live, there are people who wouldn't see themselves as poor but, in comparison to what you see around Canberra, they're poor. They have a unique thing, a lot of them.

They live in weatherboard and iron houses on what was allotted—five-acre blocks. The magical thing about five-acre blocks is five acres is just slightly bigger than two hectares. What's magic about two hectares?

Well, if you're on a block that's more than two hectares, you don't get to see that as your primary residence. Under this rule, the block's too big. A hectare is 2.471 acres, so two times 2.471—surprise, surprise—is less than five.

So magically, for all these poor people even their primary domicile is not tax-free when they sell it. Well done—stroke of genius—because there's nothing better than to make poor people poorer. That's how it works when you don't know what you're doing.

We now see the Treasurer in panic mode. It's chaos. We really don't know what's happening.

The government is changing it, carving things out. The Prime Minister has come in on the show. He's worried about votes.

It's chaotic. They're running around seeing what the Greens will vote for to try and pass the most substantial financial document for the nation responsible for the expenditure of well over $700 billion a year. They're running around talking to the Greens about how they're going to change it all around.

This is quite a remarkable state of affairs we're in. Now, I'm not saying that the coalition hasn't done bad budgets as well. I was present for Joe Hockey's budget.

That was a train wreck. This is up there with it—an absolute train wreck. What you hear all the time from wonderful colleagues on the other side are people going through the talking points who have absolutely no idea about how business works.

So here's the suggestion: if you want to make the assets on the balance sheet work, you must give a strategic mechanism that gives them an advantage. One of the great strategic mechanisms that gives them an advantage is the price of energy. To get the price of energy going, you have to have a continuous supply that's predictable and reliable, which is coal-fired power.

You have to have the brains not to blow up Liddell power station but to actually refurbish it and make it bigger and better and make it work. That's what brains do. That gives you a strategic asset on your balance sheet.

Intermittent power, by its very nature, is unreliable and expensive because you have to get it to match up to 24/7 power, and people will quote you intermittent power prices but they don't quote you the $42 billion for Snowy Hydro 2.0 or the batteries or the transmission lines, or the disruption to rural communities that underpins it. So that's just one thing.

If you had the bravery and the brains to make your assets on your balance sheet work better then you would actually earn the revenue to pay for the trinkets on the PNL. But where we are now is you're going to have neither. You're going to go to the prudent and say, 'If you're prudent and succeed, we're going to take half of what you made,' and then you're going to go to the liabilities on your balance sheet and say, 'For what we can't rip off prudent people, we'll just borrow from other people, a lot of them from overseas.' That is an absolute fiasco of a situation you have put the nation in.