MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator GHOSH (Western Australia) (16:48): The coalition have long since abandoned any financial coherence or commitment to financial discipline in this country. At the last election and the period leading up to it, they abandoned their commitment to lower taxes as part of their elements of political offering. This is another motion that reminds Australians that the coalition are not for working Australians and that they're not even for lower taxes anymore.

The lack of coherence or ideological consistency on that side is befuddling. Senator McGrath wants to talk about political bubbles and the Canberra bubble, and it's really easy to do that. But I can tell you that the biggest bubble in this country is the one enveloping the Liberal and National parties, and it's growing and growing.

It's a bubble between them and reality. It's a bubble between them and ordinary experiences in this country. When they come in here and talk about lower taxes and pressures on household budgets, let me tell you a few things about that.

There are enormous pressures on household budgets in this country at the moment. People are doing it tough right around Australia. Every time the Albanese government has tried to relieve that pressure, those opposite have voted against it.

Let me remind you of a few of those bits and pieces. Whether it was energy bill relief, delivering tax cuts for working Australians, trying to build more housing supply or trying to give first home buyers and people trying to get into the housing market a fair go by changing the tax incentives to try and even up their chances against investors who could invest with deep pockets and a much longer time horizon in terms of their returns, this government has tried to take the pressure off and those opposite have voted against it every time.

But let's go to taxes, because it is Labor governments in this country that reduce taxes. Whether it's Hawke and Keating or whether it's Albanese and Chalmers, it is Labor governments that preside over big tax reductions and big tax recalibrations. The Albanese government has been at the forefront of these changes.

Now, can I tell you what happened in 2022, when this government came into power. They were handed, by the Morrison government, what were called their stage 3 tax cuts. That was a decade-long commitment worth hundreds of billions of dollars that would have delivered its largest benefit to the highest income earners in this country—not working Australians doing it tough but the highest income earners.

And that's a policy that the coalition designed. It's a policy that they legislated. So on days like today, when they come in and talk about pressures on household budgets and about working Australians doing it tough, you must look a little askance.

I'm not sure I saw Senator McGrath blush, but he should have been. In January 2024, we recalibrated those tax cuts to help 11 million low- and middle-income taxpayers receive a bigger tax cut than they would have got. Those are the people under pressure, paying less tax—more money to spend on groceries, clothes and other essentials—and that's been part of a broader tax agenda.

The budget this time legislated another two rounds of tax relief designed to help lower income Australians. From 1 July 2026, the 16 per cent tax rate, applying to income earners between $18,000 and $45,000, dropped to 15 per cent, with a further reduction from 1 July 2027. That might not sound like much, but, when you accumulate what the government has done across the term in government, that's a big reduction.

So it's a little bit disingenuous to come in here and talk about pressures on household budgets and about Labor's tax agenda when that tax agenda has been recalibrated to help people on the downside of advantage—people doing it a bit tough. By 2028, Australians will have received tax cuts worth around $3,000 a year. That's for someone on the average wage; it'll be slightly higher or lower depending on precisely where you fit on that spectrum.

But that is $3,000 more a year in tax cuts for those under pressure. The minimum wage is now at $1,000 a week. In fact, since we came to government, the national minimum wage has increased by more than $12,000 a year.

That's not set by the government; that's set by the Fair Work Commission. But, every time in this government's tenure that that someone has gone to the Fair Work Commission to lift the rates, the government supported it in their submission. Low wages are not part of our architecture as they are of the coalition side's.

But what about all the other bits and pieces that fit into a household budget on the cost-of-living front? We have reduced the cost of medicines by lowering the price of prescriptions on the PBS to $25. Across Australia, that's around $200 million worth of savings for people when they get sick or need medicine.

Our boost to the bulk-billing incentive has seen a significant increase to GPs treating patients free of charge. In WA, the number of practices billing all patients on a bulk-billing model was 111 in November 2025, and, as of June this year, it's 235. So, across the board, we are taking pressure off household budgets.