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December 17, 2025
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Good afternoon. The primary purpose of my visit to Sydney today was to visit Bondi to express my support and condolences directly to the Sydney Jewish community following Australia's worst ever terrorist attack on Sunday and to meet with Jewish community leaders and the Special Envoy for Anti-Semitism, Jillian Segal. But it's also an important day for the country when it comes to the budget and the economy. And while I'm not at all critical of the government in proceeding with MYEFO today, I have to confess it feels a bit uncomfortable to be talking about routine policy and political matters after such a horrific and shocking event.
But on to MYEFO. Today was the day and the opportunity for Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher to pump the brakes on spending. To stop the upward pressure the federal government's reckless budgets have put on inflation and interest rates. And they squibbed it. They failed to take the necessary action to alleviate the upward pressure on inflation that is being delivered by the federal budget and therefore they will be responsible if interest rates have to rise next year as the National Australia Bank, the Commonwealth Bank and many others are predicting. The Albanese government has been warned by economists, by business leaders and the Opposition that their reckless spending is driving up inflation and now the inflation genie is well and truly out of the bottle. It's above the target band in headline and in underlying terms and it's forecast to stay that way for some time which is why markets and so many economists are predicting inflation will rise and interest rates will have to as well. Let's not forget that there have been 12 interest rate rises on Labor's watch and only three interest rate cuts. If that's reversed with one or two interest rate increases next year, then Australian families will be worse off. Already, people paying an average mortgage of $600,000 are about $20,000 a year worse off under Labor.
Some of the key stats out of MYEFO today that leapt out at me and demonstrate this ongoing reckless spending from Labor is the $37 billion deficit forecast for this financial year. It is more than triple last year's deficit of $10 billion. The $38 billion in decisions that will take effect in this financial year. For the second year in a row, Jim Chalmers has effectively turned what would have been a Coalition surplus into a Labor deficit. If only Labor had kept the Coalition's budget rules of offsetting new spending, we could have had a budget surplus last financial year and we could still have had one this financial year. MYEFO upgrades real growth in spending from 3% at budget time to 4.5% or twice the rate of economic growth. At a time when economists are calling for spending restraint to prevent rate rises, Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher continue to loosen the purse strings.
The Treasurer wanted to claim credit today for his paltry $2 billion of budget improvements over the forwards, but these improvements are in the out years. In the next two years, when inflation is above target, his decisions actually worsen the budget bottom line and put more pressure on inflation. This of course comes after the Albanese Government took decisions since coming to office that worsened the budget bottom line by $110 billion. This financial year, the government has already received a $15 billion revenue windfall, but $9 billion of that has gone straight back out the door in higher spending.
What Labor has now delivered is permanently larger government, permanently higher spending and permanently larger deficits. They've baked in spending at the highest level we've seen in almost 40 years outside the pandemic. MYEFO also confirms that the Treasurer has given up all hope of ever balancing the budget. They've forecast no balanced budgets for the next decade. That is the legacy of this Government's decisions. And of course Australians are ultimately going to have to pay for all this. The Treasurer will now collect an additional $17 billion of income taxes over the forwards which wipes out the entirety of the meagre income tax cuts that the Treasurer took to the election. The truth is, when Labor spends, Australians pay. Thank you.
ENDS