Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2026-2027, Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027
Mr CHESTER (Gippsland—Deputy Leader of the National Party) (17:36): I must say to anyone listening at home: you must feel like you're in a parallel universe when you hear contributions from the government saying that everything's rosy, everything's great, and Australians have never had it better. In the real world, when you get out there and you talk to Australians, they're angry, they're frustrated and they've been left behind by a government which has made them worse off in just four years.
The message I get, everywhere I go, is that Australians want their country back. This week's Mood of the Nation poll found that 66 per cent of Australians believe the country is heading in the wrong direction—that 66 per cent of Australians believe our nation is not on the right track. And who could blame them?
They have experienced a declining standard of living. They have seen, over the last four years, 15 interest rate rises. The average Australian mortgage holder now is paying $25,000 per year more in interest than they were before the Albanese government came to power.
And, up against those headwinds, families would have turned on the TV on budget night and found out that they had been misled repeatedly before the 2020 election. The voters won't forget, because the Prime Minister himself, in a very snippy little interview where his glass jaw broke in front of the assembled press gallery, said he'd 'told you 50 times'—50 times—that he was ruling out changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing.
After the federal election, in May last year, the Prime Minister continued, when he said: 'We have a mandate for what we took to the Australian people. That is our mandate.' They're his own words: 'We have a mandate for what we took to the Australian people. That is our mandate.' The Prime Minister has no mandate for the changes announced in the federal budget which hit small-business owners and which hit our farming communities.
And he knows it. The Prime Minister knows that he's broken his word. He likes to say, 'Now I've changed my position,' or some other little weasel words, to try and get around it.
He's fundamentally broken a promise to the Australian people, and they won't forget it. Why can't this Prime Minister just be honest? Just be honest with the Australian people and say: 'I did break my promise.
But these are my new policies, and I'm going to take them to the next election and give you a chance to vote on them.' That's kind of how a democracy is meant to work: you have a policy position; you take it to the voters; the voters decide; and you get a winner. What you don't do—unless you're a little bit gutless—is to mislead voters and tell them 50 times you're not going to do something, and then, at the first available opportunity, break your word and give no-one a chance to vote on it.
This is going to hang around those opposite like a dead albatross, all the way to the next election. The member for Chifley shakes his head. And they've got every right to be confident, because they've got 94 members of the House of Representatives.
They think they're on a winner. I can tell you: when you get out on the streets and you listen to people, they know they have been misled, deceived, by a prime minister who cannot be trusted with anything he says, going forward, because he told us 50 times he wasn't going to change capital gains tax or negative gearing, and he's done exactly the opposite without having the fundamental decency to take it to the Australian people.
In his own words—'We have a mandate for what we took the Australian people. That is our mandate'—he has no mandate for what he's done in the budget. The Prime Minister also told Australians—this is probably the funniest thing I've heard out of him in recent times: 'My word is my bond.
I believe that, when you go to an election and you make commitments, you should stick to them.' It's good advice for any leader. He also said, 'I will lead a government that keeps its promises.' So why would any Australian believe him in the next election when he rules out other tax changes? They know he'll just conveniently change his mind after election and do whatever he wanted in the first place.
This is Bill Shorten's 2019 election campaign being delivered by the current Prime Minister, but at least Bill Shorten had the guts, the intestinal fortitude, to take it to the voters. We even had the member for McMahon saying, if you don't like our policies, don't vote for them. Australians don't need to be told twice; they didn't vote for them.
That is why this is such a fundamental deceit of the Australian people—because they didn't actually seek a mandate for this. The Labor Party knew that, if they'd sought a mandate, what happened in 2019 would happen again, because, if people didn't like their policies, they wouldn't vote for them. They always planned to do this.
That is the disgrace that is at the very fundamental core of the budget that was delivered by the Treasurer only a couple of weeks ago. Instead of a plan for the future of regional Australia, in the budget we saw more broken promises, higher taxes, more debt, lower living standards and fewer homes for Australians. The budget papers themselves say that, under the changes being delivered by this government, 35,000 fewer homes will be built.
That's in their own budget papers. We're facing a decade of deficits worth $150 billion, but the greatest deficit isn't $150 billion; it's the deficit of trust that now exists between this Prime Minister and the Australian people. A hundred and fifty billion dollars is a lot of money, but the deficit of trust that exists now between this Prime Minister and the voters of this country has been widened in a manner which is unprecedented in my time in this parliament, and that's 18 years.
To see a prime minister so deliberately mislead the Australian voters and then pretend nothing happened is quite extraordinary. The deceit which goes to the very heart of this budget is these mealy-mouthed claims from those opposite that it's about intergenerational equity, but it's actually about intergenerational fraud, and they know it. The negative gearing treatment in the budget and the way it's been grandfathered to protect people like me and people like the Prime Minister but then pull up the ladder of opportunity for young people in this country is quite extraordinary—again, when you acknowledge that no-one took it to the election in the first place.
The Prime Minister, like me, has worked for a long time, purchased a family home and then been in a position to invest in an investment property, have it negatively geared and have the benefit of that tax treatment. But what happens now is that people who hadn't made those investments prior to budget night no longer have that opportunity in the same manner which the Prime Minister and I have enjoyed throughout our working careers.
A government member interjecting— Mr CHESTER: The member opposite says, 'Wrong.' When he stands up, he can explain to explain to the Australian people who want to buy an existing home whether they can negatively gear like the Prime Minister. Oh, no, they can't. Not an existing home—exactly.
You changed the rules. Come in spinner! You changed the rules.
So young people don't have the same rules that I had access to and the Prime Minister had access to, and you're too gutless to take it to an election. You are so gutless. You're so brave now.
Why wouldn't you take it to the Australian people at the election? A government member interjecting— The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Swanson ): Order! I'll remind members to address their comments through the chair.
Mr CHESTER: And I remind those opposite that interjections are disorderly! Instead of helping young Australians into their own homes, the Treasury itself has acknowledged that the tax change will result in 35,000 fewer homes being built and that rents are expected to increase. We've seen in regional Australia a government which constantly punishes the people who live outside our capital cities, because by and large they don't vote for the Labor Party.
We've seen it with water buybacks in the Murray-Darling basin, which stripped water out of productive use in the communities which feed and clothe our nation. We saw it with the cut to the Inland Rail project. It's quite extraordinary to cut the Inland Rail project and, in the very next breath, throw a few billion dollars at the suburban rail project in the Melbourne metropolitan area.
This is part of Victoria's Big Build, which has been exposed as a home for rorts and corruption involving the CFMEU and bikie thugs, to the turn of $15 billion per year. The Big Build program has been independently assessed as having people working as traffic coordinators and then performing as strippers for the CFMEU members in the workers hut at night. What steps has the government taken to ensure that no federal taxpayer dollars are going to assist the rorts and corruptions on that program?
I can tell you, in Victoria today, when they see the reports of $15 billion being wasted on CFMEU rorts and bikie thugs, they know that's hospitals and roads that weren't built and roads that weren't fixed. That is the lost opportunity when $15 billion of taxpayers' money is wasted in this manner. And now we find out this government is throwing more money at the suburban rail project, a project that has not even been assessed by Infrastructure Australia.
Sadly, this budget is one which divides Australians more than ever before. I want to refer to the capital gains tax changes and how they will impact on many of our farming families. I can promise you that, out of 150 members in the House, probably about 145 of them have no idea what it means.
From my own perspective, I've been getting some advice today and over the last couple of weeks, trying to understand how this will play out. This is so complex and so damaging to Australian farming families. The government has no idea what it's just done.
As the Victorian Farmers Federation has pointed out, more than half of the farming families in Australia will miss out on any concessions under these changes, and they will face massively higher tax bills at the time they try to transfer their properties within their families. Succession planning is hard enough as it is, when you have an asset-rich and, in many cases, cash-poor business.
I don't think the government understands what it's done here. We want to see more families taking up life on the land, and these changes will lead to more corporate farms. Today I visited a farm at Bungendore with the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Nationals.
Paul, who's about 70 years old, and his daughter Hannah run a mixed-farming enterprise and a local butcher shop. They're worried about the impact of the capital gains tax changes on their family farm, which has been in the family now for three generations. The minister was asked about this in question time today, and she clearly doesn't understand her own government's changes, which do, once again, represent a broken promise to all Australians.
As I said, the Victorian Farmers Federation has publicly warned the government that more than 50 per cent of farmers will not receive a capital gains tax concession, because the concession thresholds have not been adjusted. They will pay massively higher tax bills when transferring their farm ownership to their children. What this will mean is that some farming families will have to sell off parts of the property, just to pay the tax bill, or, perhaps even worse, they won't make any succession plan at all.
They'll wait till the farmer dies and then won't transfer the property in an orderly way. They'll seek to avoid the changes altogether. The VFF acting president, Peter Star, said the current thresholds no longer reflect the reality of modern farming businesses.
He said: Family farms have been locked out of concessions that were specifically designed to help them transition between generations. Farmland values have increased dramatically over the past 20 years, but the thresholds governing access to CGT concessions have stayed frozen in time. We're working off a framework that is no longer relevant.
The government has been told that by the Victorian Farmers Federation, but it hasn't acted. The minister today, in her answer, demonstrated she has no idea what this is going to do to more than 50 per cent of farming families when they try to undertake succession planning in their businesses. Budgets are always about choices.
In this budget, the people in my community and throughout regional Australia know the Albanese government didn't choose them and didn't choose our farmers. There's a $52 million cut in this budget to the Future Drought Fund. Maybe the government believes we'll never have another drought—I don't know.
At a time when the global conflict is driving up fertiliser prices, increasing diesel costs and putting pressure on food production around the world, the government has failed to provide a single new dollar to implement the unfinished National Food Security Strategy—not a dollar to implement it; it's quite extraordinary. They're clawing back funding from the Pest and Disease Preparedness and Response Program as part of more than $104 million in agricultural grant reductions.
At the same time, the government has allowed the Supporting Communities Manage Pest Animals and Weeds Program to lapse, without any replacement. Budgets are about choices, and the government didn't choose regional Australia. It certainly didn't choose our farming communities.
Farmers are already battling—exploding populations of deer, wild dogs, feral pigs, invasive weeds and growing biosecurity threats—but Labor's response in this budget is to cut the preparedness funding and walk away from coordinated pest management. I'm the first one to acknowledge that state governments have a major role to play when it comes to natural resource management and feral animal control, but federal government has a critical role to play in controlling invasive species as well.
Everyone accepts that invasive species are responsible for more extinctions in Australia today than climate change or any other issue. That's accepted by everyone who works in natural resource management, and yet here we have a government that is cutting funding for practical environmental management and invasive species control. I'm going to finish where I started.
There is a growing mood for change in our nation. We see it in the opinion polls, and everyone acknowledges these are very volatile times in the Australian electorate. The mood that I am sensing in my community is Australians feel like it's business as usual in parliament—in this place, under this Prime Minister—and that 'business as usual' is just more broken promises.
They want their country back. After four years of the Albanese government, Australians are worse off—and they know that our nation is heading in the wrong direction.