Anne Webster
Mallee · National Party · Australia
“The government's first duty is to protect its citizens and, arguably, its most vulnerable citizens—in this case, children. Today that duty extends into a digital world, where the playground has actually moved online and where too often it is unpoliced and unsafe.”
“We know that, despite the ban, large numbers of children are still accessing these platforms because enforcement has been weak and the regulator has not been given the tools it needs.”
“They worry about exposure to violent content; harmful algorithms; cyberbullying; scams; predatory, paedophilic behaviour; and the relentless pressure that social media can place on young people's mental health. These concerns are real, and they deserve to be taken seriously.”
“For many young Australians, social media is where they access news, educational content and creative learning. It's where they stay connected with friends and family. It is where they participate in their communities and engage in public debate.”
“My constituent asks that there be some sort of agency or protocol where these accounts can be collated, investigated and closed where applicable.”
“Labor rejected it and then, in the 2024 budget, accepted it. We pledged in June 2024 that we would deliver the under-16s social media ban, which Labor, thankfully, copied.”
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“The pharmacy prescription framework has not worked. I said at the time it would not work, and here we are. Illegal supply remains dominant, and pharmacists did not ask to be conscripted into Labor's failed nicotine controlled experiment. Labor's failure is also feeding organised crime. The Illicit Tobacco Taskforce was created to detect, disrupt and dismantle serious organised crime syndicates dealing in illicit tobacco. The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has said that organised criminals view illicit tobacco as low risk and high reward. Even the Albanese government admits the illicit market has become a serious organised crime problem. The ACIC links illicit tobacco to organised crime entities and outlaw motorcycle gangs. That is why this bill gives agencies stronger tools and lifts penalties.”
“In the black market, which Labor has allowed to grow, those protections disappear. Estimates published before the latest ABS numbers had already placed the illicit tobacco market at around 55 per cent of the total market in 2025, valued at about $5.6 billion, with missed excise revenue estimated at between $7.7 billion and $11.8 billion. Treasury has downgraded tobacco excise revenue by $8 billion over the next five years. So, under Labor, we have a black market undercutting lawful sellers, hollowing out revenue, weakening public health warnings and making organised crime richer. That is not a small policy problem. It is Labor's double failure. It is a double failure. Labor's response has been a half-baked vaping prescription model. In fact, that is too generous. It is not half baked; it barely made it to the oven.”
“I remember the arguments when vaping came in that it would be an off-ramp from smoking. I don't think so. I don't think anybody who looks outside in our streets and sees teenagers vaping more and more, eventually going on to smoking, would believe that. Australian research has warned that vaping could add at least $180 million a year in health system costs from only one part of the group of vape users who go on to smoke. That is on top of the already huge cost of smoking related disease. This is also why Labor's failure to control the black market is such a public health disaster. For decades, governments have worked to make the dangers of smoking clear through warning labels, plain packaging and strict point-of-sale rules. Those protections only work when the market is regulated.”
“As shadow minister for regional health, I say this plainly: Labor's tobacco policy failure hits hardest in regional Australia, where health services are already stretched, household budgets are already under pressure and people have fewer doctors and fewer services to turn to. I've been saying for seven years in this place that your postcode should not determine your health status, but under Labor it absolutely, increasingly does. Then there is vaping. The AIHW says seven per cent of Australians aged 14 and over were recurrent e-cigarette users in 2022-23. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing says one in six teenagers aged 14 to 17 have vaped and one in four people aged 18 to 24 have vaped. It also says young people who vape are three times more likely to take up smoking.”
“Labor wants this debate to sound like it is only about excise revenue or personal choice. It is not. It is about people getting sick. It is about the pressure that smoking related disease puts on families, hospitals and taxpayers and communities who are living with increased crime, and it is about a government that has let the burden fall hardest on those with the least access to care. In 2022-23, the AIHW reported that 20 per cent of people in remote and very remote areas smoked daily, compared with seven per cent in major cities. Women in very remote areas were 5.5 times more likely to smoke during pregnancy than women in major cities. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in very remote areas, smoking rates were 46.7 per cent, compared with 20 per cent in major cities.”
“The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says daily smoking among Australians aged 14 and over fell from 19 per cent in 2001 to just 8.3 per cent in 2022-23. Labor points to legal sales as though the problem is shrinking, but legal sales alone no longer tell the full story. Actual nicotine consumption is rising. That is what happens when government policy drives people out of the regulated market and into the hands of criminals. Labor's failure carries an enormous public health cost. The AIHW has estimated the social cost of tobacco at $155.4 billion in 2021, projected to rise to $159.7 billion in 2022-23, with healthcare costs alone estimated at $7.9 billion. Tobacco remains the second leading risk factor driving Australians' burden of disease, accounting for 7.6 per cent of total disease burden in 2024.”
“The ABS says household spending on legally purchased cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved since 2020, but please don't get excited. Labor cannot pretend Australians have suddenly stopped smoking. The evidence shows more people are buying illegal tobacco instead. An article in the Australian on 3 June showed the explosion of illicit tobacco in stark terms, with the problem taking off after the June 2022 quarter—believe it or not, Labor's first quarter in office. In fact, someone in the House today said to me that their pouch of tobacco used to cost them $120 but now costs them $20. How is that possible? Before Labor came to office, daily smoking was continuing to fall under the coalition government.”
“Under Labor legal tobacco has become so expensive and nicotine rules have become so distorted that a huge part of the market has simply gone underground. People have not stopped using nicotine; they have moved outside the legal system Labor was supposed to protect. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says nicotine consumption in Australia increased by almost 40 per cent from 2017 to 2025. It also says illicit sources rose from 12 per cent of total tobacco consumed in 2017 to 80 per cent in 2025. That is not a rounding error. That is not bad luck. That is Labor's policy failure in plain sight. That is Labor's legacy. That is the health minister's legacy. They have allowed illegal tobacco to become normalised in the minds of too many Australians.”
“I rise to speak on the Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026. This bill is before the House because Australia is no longer dealing with a small compliance problem. Under Labor we are dealing with a black-market crisis, a public health crisis, a law and order crisis and a crisis of confidence in government policy. This did not happen by accident. It is not something Australia can blame on events overseas. It is homegrown, and responsibility sits firmly with Labor. The bill increases penalties, expands investigative powers, allows telecommunications interception in illicit tobacco investigations and strengthens unexplained-wealth, search warrant and proceeds-of-crime powers. Those are serious tools and they are needed, but let us be honest about why we are here.”
“This is crushing aspiration at its source. So I say to this government: listen to Vince. Listen to the young Australians asking, 'Why bother?' Scrap this tax, stop punishing effort and restore hope.”
“Labor's toxic taxes don't need a tweak, a carve-out or another Canberra fix; they need the axe. You don't fix a bad tax by making it more complicated; you scrap it. Let me tell you about Vince, a 19-year-old from my electorate of Mallee who grew up in foster care in a family with no real ambition. He refused to let that define him. He got his first job at 14. Now he studies, works and invests what little he has left each week because he is trying to get ahead, and Labor wants to take nearly half of that away. Vince puts it plainly. 'What is the point of investing?' he said to me. 'Why take on all the risk and only get half the reward?' He has done the numbers. This policy could cost him nearly $40,000, and he says it leaves him feeling hopeless and frustrated—'hopeless', from a young man who did everything right. This is not fairness.”
“That is called cutting red tape. Consider Labor's $77 billion tax grab, which they claim in large part is to help young people buy a house. What a load of terminological inexactitude.”
“In Prime Minister Albanese's natural-party-of-government dystopia, unions have their fingers in all the pies. Nothing progresses without their say so and a heavy amount of government subsidies to boot. Small businesses will go by the wayside because the union movement perceives small businesses as enemies—they won't unionise a small-business workforce. It's much easier to crush small businesses and have big, unionised business take its place and get a sweetheart union deal that supports the Labor Party all the way to the bank. Sorry, I mean all the way to the election. Take the construction code, for instance, making it hard for aspiring homeowners and small businesses alike to establish and grow. The construction code now runs to 2,000 pages. We on this side of the house have pledged to slash it back to 200 pages.”
“I wonder why that would be! It is plain as the nose on your face—another sham. Meanwhile, they're ripping the funding for Mallee communities out of the budget papers. It is shameful. But the other big reasons these projects are blowing out, these 'big builds', as they're called in Victoria, is Labor's cosy relationship with the CFMEU. Labor's plan to be the natural party of government is because they would be the only form of government possible, a bit like China—eliminate all the competition, tell fairytales at elections and in budgets, portray your opponents as holding positions they actually don't and blabber nonsense in the House in front of TV cameras on social media and hoodwink the electorate. It's called gaslighting the good people of Australia.”
“Take, for instance, Rewiring the Nation. We saw the factual gymnastics before the budget that climate related spending would reduce, yet spending in net zero continues at speed in the budget papers and the cost of transmission line projects keeps going up and up. Consequently, so will every Australian's power bill—everybody in this chamber, everybody across Australia. This is one big reason communities like Mallee don't want transmission lines, yet Labor would prefer foisting transmission lines and associated energy eyesores in coalition electorates rather than their own. I know that may shock this side of the House, but it just appears to be the facts. The recent renewable energy zone—so-called—issued by the Victorian Labor government, recently fastidiously went out of its way to exclude the federal electorates of Bendigo and Ballarat.”
“Labor, on the other hand, are a fraud on the Australian people, taking a policy platform to the May 2025 election that had nothing to do with the real policy platform of socialism that we, small businesses and farmers have seen in the May budget. Labor's shock budget hits capital gains, negative gearing and trusts in ways they promised fervently before the election they would not do. I think it was 50 times. How many times do you need to be told, media? Labor have done more than rewrite the electoral playbook—they have thrown it out, burnt it on a pyre of all their other broken promises. Labor went to an election with a policy platform that was a complete fabrication, and small-business owners, farmers, self-funded retirees and young Australians are feeling the brunt. Let me focus on regional Australians.”
“With the greatest respect to my colleague the member for Gippsland, I think the text of this motion might be a little too kind to the Albanese Labor government. Labor's budget is worse than broken promises and toxic taxes. It exposes the 25 May election as a hoax, a sham. Small businesses and farmers are the primary victims of Labor's election hoax. You see, since federation, the Nationals and Liberals have been the natural parties of government in coalition. That is a statistical fact. The Prime Minister knows it because he and his Labor colleagues covet the mantle of Labor being the natural party of government.”
“My question is to the Minister for Housing. Does the minister count detached granny flats towards Labor's housing targets? If so, why won't Labor allow Australians who build them to access negative gearing? Isn't this just another example of Labor making up the rules as it goes, with toxic taxes that will mean fewer homes and higher rents?”
“In the same vein, the 2025-26 budget expanded GP training, and while the data shows that GPs are in shorter supply in rural and remote, MM 5 to 7, areas—shock horror!—no training places were allocated to the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine. What is that about?”
“It actually makes my heart hurt for all the people who live in regional and rural Australia and who are being done over by Labor governments who do not give a rat's for their existence, their wellbeing, their health and their quality of life. It is honestly outrageous, and this schedule is another virtue signal. One hundred additional Commonwealth supported places were allocated in last year's budget to train doctors, with the intention to increase the likelihood that graduates will work in primary care in rural, regional and underserved metropolitan areas in particular, yet there was no tangible objective mechanism to ensure universities recruited rural students or programs to align with the evidence base and deliver end-to-end training in truly rural locations.”
“The National Health Reform Agreement's addendum 'Schedule F—better health equity for rural and remote communities' is a first. It is a step in the right direction, but if the government is serious about improving health equity for rural, regional and remote Australians why doesn't the new agreement include clear KPIs to that effect? So much for transparency! How does the government intend to measure performance against the high-level commitments and principles contained in schedule F, if at all? Does anyone really think that the states and territories will deliver just because there are a few principles included in a document? I don't think so. Not only are there no performance measures; there is no funding attached to the schedule. Truly, it makes my head hurt.”
“Yet state based travel reimbursement schemes like the Victorian Patient Transport Assistance Scheme, VPTAS, have for many years been criticised for being woefully inadequate in their support of rural patients travelling to access care. And guess what the Victorian Labor government have done to that scheme. They've cut it again. So, for the people who live six hours away by road: 'Well, too bad! If you're 80 and you're sick, you're just going to have to get in a car and travel along those awfully bumpy roads to get to Melbourne to get the care.' It is an outrage that the Labor government does not give any respect or dignity to those who live in the regions—and it is on repeat. Labor is all talk and no action when it comes to delivering outcomes for regional Australians.”
“Where is the map— of approximately 5.6 million Australians not able to access a UCC? Member for Durack, I hear what you're saying, and it is very true across Mallee, bar one town. In this budget, public hospital funding was increased by $25 billion over five years. How much of that will go to the regions? I'd love to know, and that is my question to the minister, but I doubt that there will be an equitable share for the 25 per cent of people who live out in the regions. Hospitals in the regions continue to struggle to recruit and retain the medical, nursing and allied health workforce they need to provide care close to home. This frequently results in rural people travelling vast distances to access care in cities or large regional centres.”
“Regional health equity is just not front of mind for this Labor government. Unsurprisingly, there were no significant new measures for regional health in the 2026-27 budget. This government continues to invest in its pet projects that are not fit for purpose in the regions, like urgent care clinics. Urgent care clinics are city-centric with large throughput models as their basis and very expensive at $216 per visit, compared to just $42.85 for a level B GP consultation. They also take GPs away from regional clinics into urgent care clinics. It makes no sense. It is not increasing the workforce. It is not solving the actual problems that we have. On that note, where is the mapping to demonstrate the government's claim that, soon, four out of five Australians will live within 20 minutes drive of a Medicare urgent care clinic?”
“But, if he's on any support payment, say the bare minimum part pension, he's safe. What a mess! Another one in the 'Chalmerama' is the exemptions from—”
“They're not just moving the goalposts; they're putting them on wheels for the Treasurer to move wide enough to ensure enough revenue is going through the big sticks. These bills grant extraordinary discretionary powers to the Treasurer, perhaps unprecedented in their scale, for the Treasurer to decide so many aspects of these laws—I'm going to coin them collectively as 'Chalmerama', and you might imagine how you'd spell that: what is a 'new residential dwelling', the apportionment method for 'transitional gains', adding CGT asset classes for the 50 per cent discount and exemptions from income support payments from minimum tax. That's interesting given Peter from south of Horsham's concern. If he isn't on any form of income support payment, he'll pay the minimum tax on the first cent he relies on as a self-funded retiree.”
“Yet these are the people Labor has gone after with this bill: the self-funded retirees and the small businesses built by hardworking Australians—families who have worked for generations for long hours to establish what they now have. The bill confers sweeping powers on the Treasurer on CGT, negative gearing and the working Australians tax offset, where the Treasurer gets the final say. As shadow minister for regional communications, I have to add that the communications minister has done this as well with the universal outdoor mobile obligation bill, or the UOMO bill—given herself powers to ultimately determine what's in or out, not the parliament. Labor are cunning with marketing, terrible in government.”
“Farmers will say, 'Maybe I will sell to the big corporate who wants my property, or take the money from the foreign owned energy company for wind turbines or solar panels, or take the money from the Victorian government for the transmission line and land access.' Do you now see the cunning masterfulness of this smirking treasurer? Put farmers and small businesses on the edge of the financial cliff so that they just jump into the manufactured ocean of government dependence. Let's remember that as many as 25 per cent of Australians receive direct welfare payments, and 18 per cent of Australians work in the public sector. That's as much as 43 per cent of Australians that depend on government for their incomes. If you add in all the government subsidies, there would only be a small minority that receive no government payment at all.”
“As I said last sitting week, this is more than a lawyers' picnic; lawyers and accountants will be popping the bubbly at all the advice they will have to give, with more compliance and red tape for business. But, more seriously, lawyers and accountants will be feeling morally challenged because they will have farmers and small businesses coming to them saying, 'I can't afford to deal with this.' The statistics show that, in my home state of Victoria, a huge number of regional small businesses are ready to close their doors. In fact, many in my electorate are closing or have closed. This bill is likely to be the last straw. Businesses will close. They'll just give up.”
“Now they aren't sure whether, with these new changes, it's worth farming at all. Amid Treasury's fairytales and fantasy stories told in the budget papers on estimates and assumptions—under the thumb of the Treasurer—are unbelievable revenue projections from these tax measures. If you believe that revenue will materialise, you believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. Cause and effect, basic physics and economics—the market will respond. Has the government modelled the rush to the age pension, part pension or full pension, to escape Labor's tax-grabbing clutches? There is a Senate inquiry into this bill, reporting later this month. But, in Labor's contempt for debate and transparency and for this institution, they will no doubt seek to slam this bill through before we have the Senate report.”
“Peter describes the taxes in this bill as 'underhanded' and 'a death tax'. Peter explains: These assets were previously exempted and so from a family farming point of view, we have to make sure we can take assets through to the next generation, to those most capable of producing for the benefit of everyone else. When times are tough, traditionally, family farms still show up, but corporate farming doesn't. He continues: So this is also now a productivity issue. If we put a tax barrier to those making the transfer of say, a farm, it puts that business at risk. This will put a lot of farms at risk and even food production at risk. I've already had one family farmer say they'd scaled back their farming activity in recent years, due to Labor's attacks on the profitability of their farm, to what they now call a hobby farm.”
“'I hadn't thought of that, and, trust me, I'll take your earnings and tax them fairly.' I would strongly suggest that this is simply not true. The Albanese Labor government and their Treasurer are not worthy of anyone's trust. Speaking of trust, in their politics of envy, Labor have long harboured their dream, their passionate desire, to crack open trusts and get at the money inside them. And here it is, in its gory detail, taxing trusts such as testamentary discretionary trusts. They are much more common than you might think, and underpin a great many small to medium family businesses—arguably, hundreds of thousands—including in my electorate. Leader of The Nationals Matt Canavan and I met with Peter Knights, an accountant, in his Knights Norfolk accounting offices in St Arnaud this last month.”
“If he was to earn a salary, he would get the $18,400 tax-free threshold, but, by earning money from modest share investments, he will be up for paying a minimum of 30 per cent tax on the very first dollar he earns. There will be widows and widowers who were set up for their retirement, living very modestly indeed in self-funded retirement. They are the people we should be upholding for not being a burden on the taxpayer purse despite having every right to put their hand out for an age pension. Labor is targeting these same older men and women. They are to be taxed from the very first modest cent they rely on to survive. It is another disgrace. Little wonder the Treasurer is adding powers in this bill to have second thoughts—an oopsie, if you like.”
“The Albanese Labor government is trashing the reputation of this place and of members of parliament while burning trust on a bonfire of our democracy. Parliament must reject these bills, and I make it very clear the coalition will be repealing these tax changes when we come to government. They are undemocratic, they are economically destructive and they are just plain wrong. Having run out of money, as the highest spending government in 40 years outside of a recession, Labor is coming after more of yours. Labor's core belief, in its socialist heart, is redistribution of wealth to those who didn't work to create it. Peter, from south of Horsham in my electorate of Mallee, raises a perfectly valid question as a self-funded retiree.”
“Labor thinks they'll use the supposed rivers of revenue from these measures to advertise on social media and hire the influencers—just as they did in the budget lock-up—to gaslight Australians, saying, 'These broken tax promises are good for you and in your best interests.' It's absolute rubbish. Secondly, this bill represents the Treasurer drawing to himself ever-increasing power and showing contempt for the parliament, as though the rest of us are just a rubber stamp. The bill contains so many elements for the Treasurer to later decide on at his whim. It makes me wonder whether his next budget saving is to shut down the parliament. Clearly, he doesn't think he needs us. It's little wonder current community sentiment on voting intention is 'a pox on all their houses'.”
“We know that Bill Shorten's tax plans—actually taken to an election; credit to him for doing that, as John Howard did with the GST—were comprehensively rejected by the Australian people. Labor lost. So, instead, Labor spread a whole lot of fairy dust at last year's election while they secretly plotted to roll out the Bill Shorten tax agenda. The Treasurer shrugs and smirks and thinks the government can burn off some one-term Labor MPs, burn off some primary vote and do this dirty, dirty deed two years out from a federal election, taking the Australian public for mugs. Labor thinks the Australian public won't remember this insult.”
“Our Australian democracy relies on parties taking promises to the electorate and implementing them if they're elected, not talking a whole lot of baloney at the election and doing something else when they get a thumping majority. This bill represents two things. Firstly, it represents the single biggest threat to our Australian democracy because it upends global precedent whereby the party that forms government does a whole range of things it swore it would do in the lead-up to the election. This bill turns 3 May 2025 election into a sham. Labor's election win was a hoax on the Australian people. In the spirit of Winston Churchill, I say that Labor has engaged in terminological inexactitude. They have put on a masterclass in 'factual Jim-nastics'.”
“Let me take your mind back to just over a year ago on 3 May 2025. I don't know about you, but I remember organising a whole lot of volunteers to stand outside designated polling booths, holding material for members of the public to take, telling them what I, as the member for Mallee, had done and, importantly, was committing to do for them if the coalition were elected in the 2025 election. I'm just checking with the House, because, in many ways, it seems like the election never happened. As far as I remember, parties normally take policy positions to the election, and we all remember the Prime Minister swearing that there would be no changes to CGT, no changes to negative gearing and no changes to trusts. When I look at the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, all of those promises are broken.”
“The coalition are saying we will deal with bracket creep, and we will index income tax. It is genuine reform that small businesses and that people on incomes have been crying out for. In just four years—and it will continue to go on—people will be saving $1,000 a year, and it will improve over time. This pattern of the Labor government reflects a broad concern. Australians are being told they're better off while their lived experience absolutely suggests otherwise.”
“When they heard Matt Canavan say that we have scrapped net zero and we will stop VNI West—I have had text after text after text from farmers who are so relieved that finally someone is listening to them and policy will change. Their futures are now back in front of them and in front of their children. They were so worried their futures were being ripped away. Finally, the issue of bracket creep remains significant. While the government offers modest short-term relief, the cumulative effect of tax settings will see workers paying substantially more over time. On average, workers may lose around $2,000 due to bracket creep, far outweighing the immediate benefit that the Labor government is saying. $250 a year, seriously—I haven't got a maths head to quickly work that out, but that's not many coffees.”
“At community forums, including events in St Arnaud and Maryborough last week, local farmers with me have expressed strong support for these commitments. Many have described feeling heard and represented, particularly after years of uncertainty and concern over large-scale infrastructure projects. There were over 220 farmers and people in the farming communities who came together at St Arnaud last Thursday to meet with the Leader of the Nationals; the Deputy Leader of the Nationals, Darren Chester; and the leader of the Nationals in Victoria, Danny O'Brien. The community made it very clear there is no social licence for the appalling way the Victorian government has been treating them. The distress in that community has been palpable for years. I have been fighting and standing with them for years. I will continue to do so.”
“On housing, the government has adopted elements of the coalition's previous infrastructure proposal but at a reduced scale, committing $2 billion instead of the $5 billion originally proposed. By contrast, the coalition's regional Australia future fund aimed to ensure a fair share of housing infrastructure investment for regional communities—something not clearly replicated in this budget. In response, the coalition's budget in reply outlines a different path. Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan have committed to reversing the new tax measures. We will repeal them. The coalition has also pledged to abandon net zero policies and halt major transmission lines to nowhere, as the Leader of the Opposition stated last week, such as the VNI West line.”
“As a result, they face disproportionately high impacts, with Australia now among the highest taxing jurisdictions in the world. The budget also introduces changes affecting trusts, including those established through wills. Discretionary testamentary trusts, commonly used by families and small businesses, will now face new tax burdens if distributions vary from year to year. Approximately 840,000 such trusts exist, with around 350 000 small businesses relying on them. It's no wonder these small-business owners are worried. From 1 July 2028, income distributed through these structures may be taxed at 30 per cent. This has been described by some as a form of death tax, affecting how families manage assets across generations. Of course, you need to die for that discretionary testamentary trust to be implemented.”
“Instead, policies affecting negative gearing, capital gains taxes and trust structures appear to have emerged after the fact, despite prior assurances. Most people would call that broken promises, especially when the Prime Minister has been noted as saying, more than 50 times, that he would not be introducing changes to capital gains tax or to negative gearing. Now, this is flat-out unacceptable. There is no mandate for the Prime Minister and his treasurer to go forward with these budget changes. Earlier proposals to tax unrealised capital gains were defeated, but fresh measures targeting wealth have since appeared. These changes have significant implications, particularly for farmers in my electorate, whose returns are often weighted toward capital gain growth rather than income.”
“That program previously provided flexible support to councils, particularly smaller ones with limited revenue bases like many of the ones in Mallee. Communities in areas such as West Wimmera and Yarriambiack relied heavily on this funding for essential infrastructure. Business owners have assessed the cumulative impact of new measures and describe the Prime Minister as effectively becoming a 'silent partner' in their enterprises due to the scale of taxation. This, of course, has been very evident in social memes—quite hilarious, except that it's true. This has raised serious concerns about respect for electoral mandates. Governments are expected to present their policy intentions clearly during elections.”
“Many older Australians are already reporting that the changes will significantly increase their insurance costs, contradicting official claims by the Treasurer. The issue of equity is not limited to age. Regional Australians are also being left behind. Inland Rail funding has been cut by more than $4 billion, with the project now expected to terminate at Parkes rather than Brisbane. That's actually quite a gap for anyone who's geographically sensitive. At the same time, more than $3 billion has been allocated to the disgraceful and corrupt Suburban Rail Loop in Victoria. Programs that once supported regional communities have been slowed, paused or cancelled. There is no funding in this budget for the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program, which I mentioned earlier.”
“The problem with this is that that lady's package dives very rapidly. She has no money left to continue the physiotherapy that she actually needs. This is rorting, and it is wrong. In the electorate of Mallee, approximately 23,400 people aged over 65 hold private health insurance, representing around 59 per cent of that age group. Nationwide, about 3.2 million Australians will be affected by changes to the rebate that Labor are bringing in. While the government suggests only a small proportion will drop their coverage, those projections rely on assumptions that many find difficult to accept. Members Health Fund Alliance says, for instance, that the supposed $482 million in savings from this measure will actually trigger a $547 million increase in public hospital costs. Where is the logic?”
“It reflects short-term politics rather than long-term planning. Aged care remains under severe pressure. Waiting lists continue to grow, with more than 230,000 people on waiting lists for aged care. Tragically, around 5,000 people have died while on that waiting list. The system labelled Support at Home is failing to deliver that support in practice. Meanwhile, the lack of price caps has allowed some providers to charge excessive fees. Steve Wilmann, a physiotherapist from the town of Mildura in my electorate, has told me that he charges $75 for a half-hour consult, but the provider charged his elderly client $215 for those repeated physiotherapy appointments. The client came in to tell him that he was ripping her off. When he looked at the statement, it became very apparent that the provider was ripping off the client.”
“Younger Australians are being locked out of tax arrangements that older generations will continue to retain through grandfathering provisions. At the same time, the government is passing on approximately $1.5 trillion in debt to future generations. Yes, that means you, kids, and your kids, and your kids after them. It raises serious questions about fairness. The budget also reduces private health insurance rebates for Australians over 65. This is presented as a measure to fund aged care, but the likely outcome is that many older Australians who have contributed taxes and paid for health cover for decades will find private insurance unaffordable. That is what I am being told. That will push them into an already strained public health system. This approach is neither strategic nor responsible.”
“While the government proceeds confidently, Australians who value aspiration and reward for effort are increasingly worried. With a large parliamentary majority, the Prime Minister and Treasurer appear determined to push through policies that risk alienating marginal seat holders while pursuing what many would describe as a radical economic program, a socialist agenda. Labor has repeatedly sought to divide Australians. It attempted to do so along racial lines through a referendum. It has presided over deep divisions in religious communities, and it is now creating divisions based on age and postcode through this budget. Despite rhetoric about intergenerational equity, the reality tells a different story.”