Treasury Laws Amendment (Delivering an Efficient and Trusted Tax System) Bill 2026

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (10:19): I always love the way that the Labor government words its legislation and the titles thereof, like 'Treasury Laws Amendment (Delivering an Efficient and Trusted Tax System) Bill 2026', as though the public needs to be hoodwinked into thinking that there is trust involved in this budget—well, there's no trust if you're a farmer, if you're a small-business owner, if you're the average, everyday, ordinary Australian family trying to pay the cost of living, your energy bills, your grocery bills, your fuel costs.

For them and for many, many others, the trust has been taken away, has been stripped clear away, in this budget. I'm glad that the Minister for Climate Change and Energy is at the table. Mr Bowen: Your honourable friend.

Mr McCORMACK: My honourable friend. There are many things on which we have agreed, and there are many, many things, Minister, that we have disagreed on. Mr Bowen: Respectfully.

Mr McCORMACK: Respectfully—always respectful. I'm always respectful. But the recent situation with fuel—and I appreciate that there's a component of this in this particular legislation—was a great worry.

Not necessarily the fuel supply—I'll say that before I get any interjections. The government kept telling everyone—particularly those regional Australians who travel further, longer and more often than our city friends—that the supply was there. The supply, apparently, according to this government, was always there.

But it was the distribution, it was the logistics, it was the supply, it was the affordability—and we saw communities such as Batlow, in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains in my electorate of Riverina, run out of fuel. We saw farmers being held almost at ransom to be able to fill their trucks, fill their air seeders and fill their tractors with diesel at a busy time—it is sowing season.

Unless the farmers take that window of opportunity after the rain comes to get their crops in, before the winter sets in and before the frosts start, they miss out. If our farmers in Australia—who we should thank three times a day, every day, when we tuck our knees under the table to eat; I think they often get forgotten—can't get their crops in for that winter season and then, obviously, harvest towards the end of the year, that becomes a food security issue.

When you have a food security issue, that becomes a national security issue. Our farmers deserve every bit of praise and every bit of assistance, and they did not receive it when the war in Iran and over the Strait of Hormuz began, when the fuel crisis began and in those ensuing weeks. What did the minister do?

He appointed Anthea Harris as the fuel supply coordinator. Anthea Harris was already a very busy person doing the review of the Water Act—busy enough, I would suggest. We probably don't have to go too far into the Water Act and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the effects they've had on our farmers to know that Anthea Harris already has a very busy job.

She shouldn't have been doing the job she was tasked with by the minister, requested by the government, and the Water Act review at the same time. She should not have been doing the minister's job, and she was. The minister should have been doing his own job, but the minister was too concerned with being the president of the COP, with being the president of fixing the world's climate—good luck with that, Minister—and our farmers were left, literally, high and dry without diesel.

For those who could get it, some of them had to pay cash and could only half fill their tanks. That's not good enough. When you're halfway through the circular rounds of your paddock and you run out of diesel, what do you do then?

Your air seeder is full of seed, and you've only half finished the job. It's a little bit like Inland Rail, only half finished—Melbourne to Parkes, instead of Melbourne to Brisbane. It's a little bit like what most of this government does.

It half finishes the job. Then they come into this place and, in the title of their legislation, use the word 'trusted'. 'Trust me,' they say; 'Trust us.' Well, we know what happens when you trust Labor. Don't ever believe what Labor says it's going to do before an election; just look at what Labor does after an election.

We remember well the 97 occasions, before the 2022 election, when Labor said it would reduce the power bills by $275. How did that work for you, Minister? Mr Violi: Fail.

Mr McCORMACK: It was a fail. I hear the member for Casey say 'Fail.' It was an abject failure, and an abject breach of trust. That is what Labor does: it breaches trust.

Then, of course, we have the situation around the capital gains issue. We had an issue around housing, we had an issue around the Murray-Darling Basin, and we had an issue with the changes to the trusts, as I said, and many farmers use that for succession planning so that they can pass the farm on from one generation to the next. Labor, in the blink of an eye, has breached that trust with this budget, with this economic 'plan' that the Treasurer brought down just a few short weeks ago.

It's hard for Labor members to go and sell this budget because it's a crock. It's an absolute breach of faith with the public, with those people who thought they would give Labor another go—and they did, in 2025. They've been let down badly again.

They've been let down by all of these breaches of faith from this Labor Party and from this Labor government. This is what happens. When Labor runs out of its money, it comes after yours—the hardworking taxpayers of Australia.

You only have to look at the changes that Labor is introducing in the National Disability Insurance Scheme space, and in the changes that it's introducing in this budget to veterans, capping services, capping those allied health, podiatry, speech therapy, psychology, psychological help, mental health care and all of those provisions that our veterans need, want, expect, demand and, most of all, deserve.

They have put on a uniform to keep us safe, to protect this country. In our hour of need, we were able to say, 'We can sleep safe at night because we know that we've got our men and women on the frontline protecting our interests, protecting our coastline and protecting our country.' Then, when they give up their uniform, they give up their military careers and they return to civilian life, what do we do?

What does this Labor government do? It turns its back on them, shuns them. It's not right, and it's not fair.

How can our veterans or anybody who wants to be a recruit and join the Army, the Air Force or the Navy expect to have that patriotism to go out and serve our country when they don't know if a future Labor government will have their best interests at heart? This government has failed our veterans. This government has shunned our veterans.

This government has turned its back on our veterans, and it's simply not good enough to cap those service entitlements. They are entitlements. They are an eligibility that our veterans deserve.

Then, the Labor government talks about trust. How can you trust a Labor government that does this to Australia's most vulnerable? In the NDIS space, we saw in January that many of those of people who live an hour from a regional hub, who rely on speech therapy, allied health, physiotherapy and all of those things that give them a quality of life that they deserve and set them on the footing for, at least, a reasonable future, had the rug pulled from them because Labor changed the provisions which they'd always had in that space and made the travel component part of the service fee.

Many of the service providers who were doing some great work, who were putting Australia's most vulnerable on the path to a better life and a better quality of life then said, 'Well, it's not economical for us to continue to provide that service for those people who live about an hour or so outside of a regional hub such as Wagga Wagga, Dubbo, Tamworth, Bendigo, Ballarat or wherever.' And so those people are already vulnerable because they live a long way out of town, and some of them can't get access to travel to get to those regional hubs.

It's hard enough when you live in the country to get quality health services, let alone when you're disabled, let alone when you don't have access to transport, let alone when you don't have access to public transport and let alone when the government then pulls the rug from underneath you and you cannot access those services which are going to give you a better quality of life.

So I say to the government: you need to go back to the drawing board. What needs to happen with this Treasury Laws Amendment bill is that it needs to go to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee for proper scrutiny. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, because, obviously, the Labor government wants to do as it always does, and that's push through the legislation.

I can remember not that long ago, the Labor government guillotined the appropriations bills from the budget before last, and so there was no ability for members of the opposition to represent their constituents and talk about what the bills meant to the average person out on the street. This is what this Labor government does. This Labor government came to office in 2022 saying, 'Let the light shine in.

Let there be transparency. Allow there to be proper scrutiny of bills,' and they have done the complete opposite with so many things. It's not right, it's not fair, and the public are wise to this.

They are wise to this— Mr Violi interjecting— Mr McCORMACK: They've certainly worked it out, member for Casey. And they have buyer regret. They do.

It's in so many areas. I will admit this bill does contain a range of technical tax measures, many of which are sensible and non-controversial. But when you have the changes to the capital gains provisions which the Prime Minister himself prior to the election—he actually got quite angry at some of the press conferences at the insistence of the journalists daring to ask him a question about CGT—went on and on and on saying that there would be no changes.

And yet now at the first opportunity, the first budget since the election, he's changing all that. He's turning it all around because it's in Labor's DNA to take a sledgehammer to aspiration. It's middle Australia that is going to hurt the most out of this.

The fact is that when you take the sledgehammer to aspiration, when you don't allow people to be able to invest, to be able to take the risk and invest, what those people end up doing is having less. When they come to retire, when it comes time for them to enjoy their twilight years, they then become a burden on the government. They then become a burden on the public health system because they don't have the capital that they would have otherwise put away to save for themselves and to save the burden and the economic cost for a future government.

And what is that going to mean in the future? It's going to mean more costs. It's going to mean more pensions are going to have to be doled out by this government.

That's what this government wants. It's socialism by stealth because this government wants people to be dependent on it for their livelihoods and for their income to be able to pay the groceries and the fuel and the power bills. And the power bills!

Minister, when you get up in parliament and talk about the fact that renewables are saving people money, I mean, really? Seriously? If you honestly believe that, you are living in la-la land.

I have people in my electorate in Yass Valley who are very worried about their investments because their communities are being littered with wind towers on an industrial scale. It's an industrial junkyard. Don't ask me.

Ask the mayor of Yass Valley, Councillor Jasmin Jones, who is very worried about the proliferation of wind towers. It wouldn't be in your electorate, Minister. Wouldn't be in your electorate, and shame on you for wanting to cover mine with them.