MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator DEAN SMITH (Western Australia) (18:23): There are only one or two ways to have a look at or to understand the budget papers. One way is to regard the government as totally incompetent. Why else would the government have introduced a grief tax?

Why else would the government have introduced a donations tax? Why else would the government have increased taxes on mum-and-dad investors around mineral exploration? If you think the government doesn't know what it's doing, you might come to the conclusion that the government is just incompetent.

The other conclusion you can come to is that the government is deceitful—that the government knows exactly what it is doing and it has chosen to tax widowers and widows, and was hoping to get away with it; that they consciously knew that their taxes would hurt charitable giving, would hurt community and not-for-profit organisations and would hurt philanthropy, and that they hoped to get away with it.

Well, in fact, they have actually got away with it, because Labor senators from Western Australia are not raising any concerns whatsoever about Labor's plans to tax mum-and-dad investors in mineral exploration. So, if we are to have an honest debate about the government's budget, there are only one or two pathways you can choose: that the government is acting incompetently, or that the government is acting deceitfully—that it knows exactly what it is doing.

I'm someone who thinks, who believes, that the government knows what it's doing, the government was hoping to get away with it, and, thanks to the outrage of many ordinary Australians, it has been caught with its hand in the till. There can be no tax cuts, no cost-of-living relief and no minimum-wage benefit if the government does not tackle this—and this is inflation.

Inflation eats away at any benefits workers might get through minimum-wage increases. Inflation eats away at any cost-of-living relief that the government might give people through the budget. That is the demon that the government has been unable to control—inflation.

And, when inflation remains uncontrolled in the economy, guess who pays for that? Pensioners pay for that. Families pay for that.

Small businesses pay for that. The government doesn't pay for it; the government actually is a beneficiary of heightened levels of inflation in the economy. So, when the government talks about cost-of-living relief, it's because it doesn't want to talk about inflation.

And why doesn't it want to talk about inflation? Because inflation is fuelled primarily through government spending. We know that this government—the Labor government under Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers, supported by Labor senators—is the highest-spending government in 40 years, outside of the pandemic and outside of a recession.

Think about that: it's the highest-spending government in 40 years. That is fuelling inflation in the economy, because the government lacks the discipline, the government lacks the economic guts, to make hard decisions. When inflation is too high, the RBA is forced to put interest rates up.

And who pays for that? Families—especially young families; families with mortgages. So this is a conscious decision by this Labor government to make life harder for Australians, not to make life easier, and what's really remarkable about that is that, in May 2022, when Anthony Albanese, then the opposition leader, was working hard to try and become the Prime Minister, he gave people a commitment.

He said that life would be easier under Labor. He said it in Perth, Western Australia: that life would be easier under Labor. Australians know there is only one truth, and that is that life has got considerably more difficult for Australians under Labor.

Living standards are falling. Productivity growth is slipping. Australians know our country is getting poorer under Labor.

Unfortunately, this is a budget of deceit and a budget of broken promises. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Scarr ): We have about two minutes left, if anyone else wants to make a contribution; otherwise, we'll move on. No?

The time for discussion of that item has now expired.