Shadow Portfolio — 26 May 2026

Ben Small used his budget-reply contribution in the House to mount a multi-front attack on the government's spending priorities, anchoring his critique in a regional-disadvantage frame while also targeting broader cost-of-living pressures. His central economic claim — that real wages have fallen 3 percent, leaving Australians facing lower living standards, higher taxes, and rising interest rates — set the tone for a speech that moved systematically through infrastructure, health, and aged care [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s013].

The infrastructure thread was the most substantive. Speaking in his capacity as shadow assistant minister for infrastructure, Small attacked the budget's $6.15 billion cut to the Inland Rail project and drew a direct contrast with the government's continued commitment to the $6 billion Suburban Rail Loop — a metropolitan-versus-regional framing designed to reinforce the argument that Western Australia and rural communities are being defunded in favour of urban Labor constituencies [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s183].

He quantified the broader regional infrastructure damage at $4.7 billion in cuts and noted that Western Australia's share of infrastructure funding has fallen to an all-time low. The omission of a promised upgrade to Busselton Margaret River Airport — an airport serving over 200,000 passengers and FIFO workers — was used as a concrete, constituency-level illustration of that pattern [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s095].

Small also targeted the budget's treatment of older Australians, arguing that increased private health insurance premiums for people over 65 would push them out of the private system and into the public hospital network — a cost-shifting argument he grounded in named constituent examples from Bunbury [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s118]. This connects the budget critique to a health-system-capacity concern rather than treating the premium increase as a cost-of-living issue in isolation.

A distinct thread honoured former member Nola Marino's advocacy on endometriosis, recalling the 2018 National Action Plan and pointing to the continued absence of a regional pelvic-pain clinic in the south-west of Western Australia [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s111]. The reference functions both as a legacy tribute and as a continuing regional health-equity argument — implying the budget has not addressed a gap identified nearly a decade ago.

Taken together, Small's contribution is coherent as an opposition positioning exercise: the budget is portrayed as delivering for metropolitan Labor seats at the expense of regional Western Australia, older Australians, and working families facing a real wages decline. No alternative fiscal envelope or costed policy platform was advanced; the speech is an attack document rather than a policy prospectus.